


We Do What We Must (Because We Can)

by plinys



Series: For science. You monster. [3]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Amnesia, Eventual e/R, M/M, Portal AU, R finally decided to show himself!, Science, Slow Build, not as cracky as it sounds, very Enjolras centric for the time being
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-07-24
Packaged: 2017-12-04 23:39:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 29,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/716374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Its been nine years since Enjolras destroyed GLaDOS and put and end to this testing, but now he's back again with new friends and new enemies as he tries not only to survive, but to remember everything that he had forgotten from all those years in suspension.</p><p>A Portal 2/Les Mis crossover, that's not nearly as cracky as it sounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Courtesy Call

**Author's Note:**

> So here it is the start of my grand Portal 2/Les Mis crossover. Its going to be pretty long so hang with me, but I've got everything all planned out! Yay!
> 
> I thought I was going to hold off for a while after the last little story, but I couldn't help it, this AU is just too much fun to write in.  
> Sorry now if this chapter is a bit rough, I just had to push through the basics to get the ball actually rolling. Enjoy! :)

He had a feeling that he was forgetting something, something important, something that he had tried to remember many times before, but the only problem was that he couldn’t remember what it was that he had forgotten. 

Wasn’t that always the problem? 

“Good morning, you have been in suspension for nine- nine- nine – nine-“

This wasn’t like the other times that he had been woken up. He remembered those hazily in the back of his mind. The basic testing of motor functions, the smooth jazz playing overhead, what they called art, and then the deep tiredness that pulled him back into a deep slumber before he could have time to really think. 

“Hello? Is anybody in there? Are you still alive? Well aren’t you going to open the door?”

The voice was familiar in a way that nagged at the back of his head, more things that he couldn’t remember, more blanks in his mind, still he surged forward a second later to open the door. 

What followed through the door was not what he had expected, not somebody like him, but some sort of AI that hung to a track that ran across the roof. It looked like a circle with one giant blue eye taking up its whole body.

“Oh my god, you look, you look _great_. How are you feeling? Or well actually don’t answer that, I just-“

“Please prepare for emergency evacuations.” 

“Stay calm! Stay calm,” the AI ordered quickly, “it said prepare that’s all, we’re just preparing nothing is going wrong.”

“This is a red alert, system down. Please head to the nearest emergency exit.”

“Right well, I am going to get us out of here, so just hold on,” the AI said before disappearing into a hole in the roof, “oh and I meant that literally.” 

It only took him a second to process what the AI meant, but then the room went jolting forward. He didn’t even know that room could do that; then again right now he couldn’t say that he knew much of anything. 

It was like he was seeing everything through a fog or a haze, unable to see clearly no matter how hard he tried. 

“Now you’ve been under for – well, let’s call it a long time, and it’s not entirely out of the question that you might have a slight case of serious brain damage. Don’t be alarmed. Actually maybe being alarmed is the right reaction. Just, well, does any of this make any sense to you? At all? If so just, just tell me ‘yes.’”

Yes.  
Yes he understood it all, but when he tried to open his mouth to say the words nothing could come out. 

“Alright, what you just did there, that was jumping. You just jumped,” if an AI could sound exasperated than this one definitely did, “Let’s try a different word, how about apple, say ‘apple’.”

“All reactor cores prepare for immediate meltdown.”

“You know what, actually that’s good enough for me, just try and hold onto something and I’m going to get us out of here,” it said one last time before disappearing into a hole in one of the walls, “and remember if anyone asks my name is Courfeyrac and last time you checked, everyone looked pretty much alive down here. Not dead.”

With that the room surged forward once more, much faster than it had the first time, the walls caving in around him as it pushed forward with the AI, Courfeyrac, chattering on from somewhere. Something about relaxation centers being offline, a downed power grid, and having the worst job in the history of jobs. 

“Alright we’re almost there; on the other side of this door is one of the old testing stations. I’m going to need you to retrieve a device, it makes holes, well they’re not technically holes, but you know what I mean. It that will help us get out of here.”

There somewhere in the haze of his memories things started to all come back slowly, through the haze he could remember it, a device like this one Courfeyrac was describing. 

“Oh, I think this is a docking station.”

Now he may not have known much, but if there was one thing that he was pretty sure about was that that was not a docking station – it looked like a wall. Still, unable to say anything else he grabbed onto what remained of the bed and braced for the impact. 

As the room (or what was left into it) rammed into the wall Courfeyrac spoke up again, “bad news I was wrong, but good news is that that’s one mystery solved. Now, I’m going to attempt a manual override on this wall.” 

Two more impacts and they broke through the wall, the force pushing him out so that he fell onto the ground surface of what must have been the testing chamber that Courfeyrac had spoken of. 

“I know you’re probably not the most suited person for this, but at least you’re a good jumper so there’s that,” he explained, “Good luck, and I will meet you around the back.”

 

“Hello and again welcome to the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, we are currently experiencing technically difficulties due to circumstances of potentially apocalyptic significance beyond our control. However, thanks to emergency protocol testing can continue as scheduled even in the event of environmental, structural or socioeconomically collapse. The Portal will open and emergency testing will begin in 3, 2, 1.”

This, this he remembered. 

Testing. It was always testing.

Somehow he just knew that this was what he was supposed to be doing, he just had to keep moving, just keep testing. Following through the motions was something that came easily to him. 

He had definitely done these same tests before; just he had a feeling that they hadn’t looked as broken down then as they did now. With plants growing everywhere and wall panels collapsing around him.

“Oh hey you made it! See I knew you could do it,” Courfeyrac said in a chipper voice as he appeared from behind one of the broken down wall panels, “alright, over there on that stand, should be the portal gun.”

He looked around himself easily spotting where the stand was, but there was no gun with it. Courfeyrac seemed to realize that as well.

“Maybe it fell off or something, just go over there and look, alright?”

Two steps further and the ground collapsed from underneath him. Had it not been for his long-fall boots he probably would have broken something on the way down. 

“Do you see the portal gun,” Courfeyrac called from up ahead, even as he looked up he couldn’t see where he had been before, too high up to see the any part of the AI other than the dim glow that came off of its single eye. “Oh and are you still alive? I suppose that’s the important question, not that you’ll answer me. You know what, I’m just going to assume that you are and meet you up ahead.”

With that the light from above moved away and he took a moment to adjust his eyes to the darkness. 

When he had finally down so he realized that not only was he standing in a puddle of water but along the walls were arrows pointing him forward. He reached up to run his fingers across them, there was familiarity about them, and they sped him forward into a room with broken down panels that made up stairs leading to where the portal gun was. 

He grabbed the portal gun and strapped it onto his arm with ease, it was only then that he looked at the room around him. 

There were six panels of what used to be walls around the room, and put all together he could see how they told a story of some sort.

A story of a god-like man in an orange jumpsuit with a halo of blonde hair – he didn’t even have to look into the murky water to know that that was meant to be him, but it’s the name written underneath it that helped to bring some clarity back to things. 

Enjolras, that was his name, how could he have forgotten so easily again?

Now that he remembered that things were starting to come back slowly.

The next painting showed what he remembered, jumping through portals, the companion cube, shooting down cameras that were recording him. 

Then the image of GLaDOS offering him cake, but the cake was all a lie in the end, and he had destroyed her, he remembered that now.

The next three panels though were things Enjolras could not remember and for a second he wondered how they related to him, but at the same time there was a familiar tug. Something locked away in his mind that connected him to these drawings. 

The closest one depicted a group of about ten or so people in lab coats (probably Aperture employees) standing around looking up at one guy that stood separate from them on top of a desk, he held one arm above the rest and had the words _for science_ written in a way that it looked as if he was shouting it. 

Beside that one was a depiction of a blond girl holding hands with a boy in a lab coat with halos above their heads and wings on their back. They were dwarfed in size though by the picture of a girl with long black hair and her arms spread wide with cords that seemed to come out of the back of her head and the expanse of her arms, her eyes were covered by pair of goggles, but the remaining visible part of her face seemed to be contorted in pain. 

Then the final drawing was one of death, if he wasn’t mistaken he would have guessed that the people from the other group drawing were the same as the ones here, all lying on the ground, with ‘x’s where their eyes should have been and at the center of it all was a drawing of the companion cube and a black handprint across the edge of it that seemed like a mistake, the way it looked so different compared to the rest of the mural. 

He leaned forward and pressed his hand to the handprint feeling as if he had done that once before.

It was just a bit bigger than his hand, but when Enjolras pulled back he felt the biggest shock.

Because this had never happened any of the previous times, the paintings had always been old, but this time the paint came with him, sticking to his hand. 

It was fresh.

Enjolras rubbed the pads of his painted fingers together, and that was when he heard it a noise off to the side, something splashing in the water.

“I – Is,” his voice cracked after going so long without speaking, but finally he was finding the words that had failed him when Courfeyrac had asked him to speak earlier. Maybe that was because he was finally pulling out of the deep fog that had previously clouded his senses. 

This time when he tried again his words made sense, “is somebody there?” He took a small shallow breath as he waited for the reply, “Hello, anybody? I know you were just here. Please come out.” 

But all he head back was the sound of his own voice echoing off the walls. 

With a small sigh he just shook his head, even if he wanted to follow the first noise, he couldn’t have been sure where it had come from. 

“Well, wherever you are, thank you.” 

At that he turned back to where the stairs were and followed the arrows along the walls that pointed him out of the chamber, but this time as he ran his fingers across them he found that they came back wet with paint.

At least now he knew that he wasn’t alone, but if only he could remember who it was that he had forgotten, then maybe they would show themselves.

 

As Enjolras followed the arrows to the exit he didn’t look back, but had he done so he probably wouldn’t have seen them anyways, with the way they hid back in the shadows. 

It was only when he had turned to corner to continue on that a voice finally spoke up.

“Is it really that impossible for you to sit still? You nearly gave us away,” came a harsh voice.

“So that’s him then, the one that you’re always talking about.”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“Then why didn’t you say something, he was right there, you could have just been like ‘hey, let me show you the way out of here, by the way I’ve been watching you since forever.’”

“Because it doesn’t work like that…”

“Right I forgot,” the other one retorted a bit too sarcastically, before seeing the look on his companion’s face and softening a bit, “he looks alright though.”

“Can you follow him for me?”

“Why don’t you do it, you’re the one that’s in love with him.”

“I can’t,” he paused and rubbed a hand nervous against the side of his face, “he can’t know it was me… It would change everything…”

“Alright fine, but you owe me one,” with that he turned away from his companion to head up the stairs that would lead to where Enjolras had gone, but he was stopped when a hand grabbed at his sleeve. Turning around he gave the other guy a look that simply asked, “what now?”

“And Gavroche, don’t let him see you.”

“He won’t even know I was there.”


	2. There She Is

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was originally going to be a bit longer, but I decided to split it into two halves.   
> So sorry that its a bit short - this was the best place to split it.
> 
> Also after this next chapter it should start moving further away from the game storyline, but I couldn't very easily skip past this whole set up...

“And there you are, see I knew you weren’t dead. Well, I was reasonably sure that you weren’t dead, but that’s not the point. Anyways, just pop a portal on the wall behind me and we can get this show on the road.” 

Enjolras nodded his head and shot the portal over through the wall panels before using it to cross over and get out of the testing chamber.

“Awesome job there, I’m so proud of you. Now, I was told never to disconnect from my railing otherwise I would die, but we’re sort of out of options here, so on the count of three, I’m going to pop off and you’re going to catch me,” Courfeyrac swirled in place a bit before pushing itself further away on the guard rail as if going some a sort of ‘running start’, “and here we go: there, two, one.”

Enjolras reached out just in time to catch the core in his arms, not missing the note of surprise when Courfeyrac spoke up, “yay, you actually caught me! I wasn’t expecting that, but nevertheless yay.” 

“Now if you will just plug me into the wall over there, I can get us out of here quick and easy.”

His eyes moved about the room until he noticed the panel of the wall shifting to open a small cubby like space, in which he inserted Courfeyrac. 

“Yeah, I can’t do this if you’re watching so just turn around.”

He blinked at the core, but refused to turn around. Enjolras may not have remembered much, but he knew better than to be so trusting of the technology around here. 

“Seriously, I can’t, please just turn around.” 

With a bit of an annoyed sigh though he gave in and a second later there was the happy computerized chime, “and bam! Secret panel!”

When Enjolras spun back around he could now see one of the panels from the room had been moved aside to reveal a maintenance area. He had seen places like this before the last time he had been in testing, but there had been writing on those walls like the writing from before. 

These walls however were clean and the walkways were in much better shape.

“Now just follow the rail and we should be there in no time.”

At least it wasn’t another testing room to go through, but there wasn’t a shortage of railed paths. Whenever they came to a fork in the road Courfeyrac would tell him which path to take, otherwise the AI spent most of the time rambling on about random useless things that only seemed to make half sense to Enjolras. 

The only thing that made Enjolras stop moving was the sound of an automated voice, “hello? Hello?”

There was a red beam of light up ahead shining through one of the glass tubes and on the other side of the glass was a turret turned on its side. 

He remembered the turrets and so he stopped before it could catch sight of them and shoot, but unlike the other turrets this one didn’t scan over them, it just kept repeating the same word, “hello?” 

Enjolras looked down to where he was still holding onto Courfeyrac to see what the AI’s advice would be, but for once the core had gone strangely silent, and if AI’s could have shown emotions in their glowing eye then this one would have looked like it was sad. 

He knew he could have asked, he had found his words earlier when looking at the mural, but instead he remained silent as they slipped past where the turret was. It was just when he passed that he heard it say words that were far too familiar, “I’m different.” 

The core remained silent for much of the time after that until they reached the final door that blocked their path.

“Now, I suppose I should let you know that in order to get out of here we’re going to have to go through her chamber, and if she is awake she will probably kill us,” he chattering a bit nervous, “so we have two options we can either stay here and live or keep going and possibly die.”

For once Enjolras knew more than the AI did, because he had seen the murals and it had all come rushing back. She was dead, he had defeated her, however long ago that had been, but she was gone.

Still, he had the worst feeling imaginable when it came to going into that room. 

Maybe it was the memory of what had transpired before.

The thing was when he tried to remember, he remembered getting out of there, which didn’t explain why he was back in the testing facility again. 

There were just too many questions left unanswered. 

“We should turn back! Please let’s just turn back, I don’t want to go in there and,” Courfeyrac paused in the middle of his frantic rambling, “oh – she’s off. How convenient!”

On the ground was GLaDOS, or what was left of her, broken pieces of the robot scattered across the collapsed ruins of what was once the control room. 

“There she is,” Courfeyrac let out a low whistle, “you know who ended up taking her down?”

Of course he did, but instead of saying so he remained silent, navigating the debris towards what he hoped was the exit.

“A human – shocking I know,” he continued, “apparently he escaped and nobody’s heard from him sense.”

Enjolras did consider speaking up then and letting Courfeyrac know that it had been him to take her down before, but he didn’t have the chance before the AI was speaking once more – he certainly loved to hear the sound of his own voice.

“Just down those stairs, and oh stairs are broken, well it’s a good thing that you’re a good jumper.”

He rolled his eyes, but not before jumping down what used to be the stairwell leading to the escape pod. He remembered this, from the last time he had tried to escape, but there had been working stairs back then. 

“This here is called the main breaker room. We’re looking for a switch that says escape pod, don’t touch anything else, don’t even look at anything else - well actually you probably have to look, but don’t touch unless it says escape pod, got it?”

There were switches for days, panels of switches that went up tens of meters into the air, most of which had labels worn off of them or peeled away over time. 

Simply put there was no way that he was going to find anything in here.

Especially seeing how dark it was.

Courfeyrac seemed to realize the same thing a second later.

“Oh, new idea! Plug me in and I’ll turn the lights on for us, that will most certainly help!”

At least this time he didn’t make Enjolras turn around once he was hooked up.

“And let there be light,” Courfeyrac said in a delighted voice, “that’s God there. I just quoted God.”

He was too distracted from retorting back something sarcastically by the sound of an ominous beeping going off from somewhere, it sounded like some sort of alert system. 

“Stay calm! Everything will be fine as long as we don’t start moving.”

As soon as the words were said the platform they were standing on started moving upwards.

“Oh this is not good. Here let me try something that should slow us down, no makes us go faster – well hey, at least I know what that does now,” Courfeyrac said in a slightly panicked voice as they platform moved up to where the remains of GLaDOS had been.

“Power up initiated.”

“That is not good – this is very not good. Don’t panic, I, I can still stop this. Just let me try and hack this.”

Enjolras ignored whatever it was that the AI had continued rambling about, because his eyes were fixed on one thing. The one thing that he had thought was impossible. Hadn’t he destroyed her before, but there it was happening right before his eyes, she was reassembling herself. 

There was a gasp somewhere behind him, a voice not his own, but he couldn’t have even turned around to look if he had wanted to. 

“Power up complete.”

“Just act natural, try closing your eyes. If you can’t see her she can’t see you.”

He knew it was impossible, because she could see him just as clearly as he could see her.

“Oh it’s you.”

“Wait, you know her?”

“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Yes it has,” Enjolras said speaking up with all the defiance that he had mustered all those years ago.

“And apparently you could talk, I guess you just never thought to mention that before, like oh when I _asked_ you to!”

“How have you been?”

“Seen better days, actually,” he replied smoothly, “what about you?” 

“I’ve been really busy being dead. Remember after you _murdered_ me.”

“You did what now?”

The claw spun down from the air and Enjolras found that he couldn’t move. His knees had locked in place, but he still glared back at her with all the defiance that he could muster. He wasn’t going down without a fight, not this time, not ever.

He watched out of the corner of the eye as one of the claws picked up Courfeyrac as well before tossing the core out of the room. There was a crunching sound and a jingle like broken parts, and even though they hadn’t known each other than long Enjolras hoped that the little guy was alright. 

“Now, I know we’ve both said a lot of things that you’re going to regret, but I believe that we can put our differences behind us.”

He honestly doubted that.

“For science. You monster.”


	3. No Cake For You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, a bit short because I had to split the last chapter up!  
> And now its time for the real action to begin - enjoy :)

He was falling. Again. 

Apparently that was a thing that happened a lot nowadays, he seemed to remember a lot less falling the last time he went through all of this, though there had been a lot more neurotoxin. So there was that.

When he finally landed he didn’t even need to listen to GLaDOS’s comments to know that he was in the incinerator room. 

This he remembered as clear as day, how he would have died in the fire had it not been for the symbol on the wall showing him how to get out of there. Instinctively his eyes searched the room for the ‘x’ that had been his hint before though it was harder to see now with the lights dimmed down. 

“Once we start testing, I’m required to keep contact with you to a minimum; luckily we haven’t started testing yet.”

“Luckily.” 

“There is one thing that I learned from all of this,” GLaDOS continued, “that in the event of a system failure I have a black box quick save feature that makes it so the last two minutes of my life are preserved for analysis. I was forced to watch you kill me over and over again for the last nine years.”

Nine years. 

It had been nine years and he still felt pretty much the same as he had before. He didn’t feel nine years older, though that was probably something to do with the relaxation station that he had been in. 

“Some other person might have devoted their entire existence to exacting revenge-“

Wasn’t that exactly what she was doing now?

“But I’m willing to ignore that, for science.” 

“For science.”

He was beginning to hate those words, and yet they felt familiar on his tongue, like he had said that many times long ago, back before all of this happened. 

They were back to testing now, something about deadly lasers (and how test subjects react to deadly lasers).

There it was again, that instinctive part of him that wanted to keep testing, that wanted to just numbly go through the motions. Even though he was able to at least remember what had happened those nine years ago, he still felt the need to go through these tests – to keep following through the motions and to not resist. 

It was a horrible feeling and one that he tried to fight against in his head without much success. 

Whoever he had been before had been changed prior to this testing, whether it was in those relaxation chambers or some other way, because this was wrong.

He knew it was wrong, and yet he had to keep moving through the chambers, popping up portals and redirecting lasers, because what else could he do?

It was one of those chambers with the aerial faith plates where something began to change, he had just flown into the air (ignoring GLaDOS’s comment about how he looked like an eagle piloting a blimp) when he saw the blinking blue light of a rather familiar core. 

“Hey there you are! Just act natural, don’t let her know that I’m here,” Courfeyrac said in a lower tone than his usual one, “I know you thought I was dead, but I’m not, and I’ve got a plan! So just keep doing whatever it is that you do and yeah.”

Then just like that the AI was gone and Enjolras was moving along to finish going through the room.

Two levels later when a door was malfunctioning he knew it wasn’t an accident, and the sound of the AI’s voice certainly helped him come to that conclusion. 

“Hey, hey up here,” he called out, and Enjolras turned to see where he had appeared from, “that there with the door that was me, shut it right down, that should keep her busy for a bit. The point is we’re going to break out of here really soon, I just need to – oh she’s back. Just keep testing and I will meet you up ahead.”

There he was whizzing off again to who knows where leaving Enjolras relatively alone once more. 

Two more chambers and this time instead of heading to where the elevator was he slipped through a gap in the wall, another part that was blocked from closing, just like the ones he had remembered from before.

The walls were old and the railways rusted to the point on breaking but there on ground were more buckets of paint and far less bottles than before. 

He curiously noted that there was a second art style along with the first one and a completely different handwriting. 

The familiar handwriting was slanted as if written with speed in a flurry of information and there was a picture of what looked like children armed with what looked like portal guns. Beside it were the words: _forgive the child who is afraid of the dark, but not the men who are afraid of light._

This was the only thing written in the old hand writing, but the rest of the little alcove was taken up by a drawing of what looked like some sort of giant creature. 

He had a feeling that he had seen one of these before, but the word could not come to his mind no matter how long he stared at the grey colors or the long trunk of the beast. 

An elephant, that’s what it was called. An elephant.

With it was handwriting that looked as if it belonged to a child, the letters still wobbly as they were written down. 

_There was a time we killed the king._   
_We tried to change the world too fast._   
_Now we have got another king, and she’s no better than the last._

The next words he read aloud tracing them with the tips of his fingers as he spoke, “here’s the thing about equality, everyone’s equal when they’re-“

“Dead.”

While he had started reading it aloud it was not his voice that finished reading the words, but the voice of somebody else. 

This time he whipped his head around to where the voice was, but found only the blank expanse of the wall staring back at him. It was like the voice had come from the drawings on the walls.

“I’m hearing things now. That’s just great,” Enjolras said a bit sarcastically as he moved away from the alcove and moved to slip back into the testing chamber. 

He wasn’t sure what would be the better option at this point, being followed or hearing voices. 

Then again, hadn’t he been warned years before that over exposure to testing could lead to superstition and hearing things, because if that was true than he was definitely getting there. 

It took four move levels, ones that definitely weren’t easy (dodging turrets, dealing with light bridges and reflector cubes) until he got another sign. 

“I’ve got a surprise for you after this test, and not a fake tragic surprise but a real one,” GLaDOS chirped from overhead, “one that you’re going to remember until your dying day.”

“If this is anything like the cake from last time than I can assure you that I don’t want it.”

“You’ll want this one, _trust me_.”

Yeah, like that was going to happen. 

Still, Enjolras navigated the chamber to the best of his ability, moving the sunbeam so that he could walk across it to where the cube had dropped down, but he had barely taken a few steps onto it when it feel from out beneath his feet and the chamber was immersed in sudden darkness. 

“Now who turned off the lights?”

“Hey over, here I’m pretty sure she can’t hear me,” Courfeyrac called lighting up one of the wall panels.

“Actually, I can.” 

“Nevermind then, we need to run, right now!”

Enjolras didn’t have to be told twice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quote in Grantaire's part of the graffiti is a rough translation of a quote by Plato.   
> (I found it while doing my Greek homework and thought it was fitting.)


	4. Almost at Fifty Percent

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter is really long. I was going to split it up, but then I wanted to keep this to exactly 13 chapters, so I couldn't.  
> That's why it took so long for the update, because its length, plus I had to play through the game to remember how one of the scenes went down, and yeah... I got a bit stuck, but no worries!

They were escaping; at least, that was what Courfeyrac kept saying as Enjolras followed the path that the AI had lit up for him.

Though it certainly wasn’t easy since GLaDOS had become aware of what they were doing and was currently making attempts to override the walls and trap them inside of them.

“And you were so close to finishing the tests, there was only one more to go, and then I would have let you go free.”

Somehow he very much doubted that one. 

“Just ignore her she’s trying to trick you.”

“Thank you captain obvious,” Enjolras smarted back before ducking along the next pathway following where Courfeyrac was leading him. 

His only hope was that the AI had figured out this escape plan back during the time when Enjolras had been doing twenty levels of mundane and rather dangerous testing. 

“This way this way, come on,” Courfeyrac said frantically, “we have to get into that elevator, then we’ll be safe.” 

He could see the elevator now, not too far off. Thankfully he had apparently been built for endurance, because the walls were crushing him behind him making it impossible to go back or even slow down without being crushed. 

When he finally made in inside the elevator he had done so just in time before the wall panel came crushing down on where he once stood. Enjolras leaned against one of the elevator walls and tried to catch his breath as the machine when whirling up to wherever it was that they were heading now. 

This had been one hell of a day so far, or was it longer than that? It sure felt like longer, it felt like he had been doing this forever. 

Honestly, he wasn’t even sure of the passing of time anymore. He didn’t feel hungry and he didn’t need to sleep which were probably signs that something was wrong, but then again he had spent the last nine years sleeping.

He could give sleeping beauty a run for her money. 

“Brilliant we made it, feel free to take a moment, but uh we’ve still got work to do,” Courfeyrac said once the elevator had slowed to a stop, “At least she can’t touch us back here – so that’s a definite plus.” 

With that in mind Enjolras closed his eyes and slumped down onto the floor that moment they were out of the elevator. Closing his eyes hadn’t made much of a difference since it was dark to begin with, but this was one of the first few chances that he’d had to just breathe in a long time. 

“So,” the AI began by drawing out the vowel of the word to a point of absurdity, “apparently you can talk now, that’s uh, well, interesting.”

“Oh yeah, I can,” Enjolras replied matter-of-factly as he ran a hand through his hair, before leaning his head back against one of the metal walls. 

“Could you before-“

“It kind of comes and goes,” he admitted opening his eyes now to look at the light that flickered from the robot, “I guess I’d forgotten how to, I’ve sort of got amnesia.” 

“Slight case of serious brain damage,” Courfeyrac said parroting back his earlier words, “I hate in when I’m right, but hey, at least you can talk now, so that is a definite plus.” 

Honestly, Enjolras wasn’t too sure if he agreed with that, because now he was going to be expected to keep up some sort of minimum level of communication with an overexcited AI, that he was not entirely looking forward too. It had been much easier to just tune him out when he hadn’t been expected to have some sort of response at the ready. Plus he thought better inside his head than out of it, but he had a feeling that if he wanted to put something to words that he would be able to do so with ease. 

“Random question,” Courfeyrac said his words cutting across the silence of Enjolras’ mind, but when the blonde gave him an exasperated look he continued, “do you happen to have a name?”

“Enjolras,” he said letting the familiar letters roll off of his tongue. 

“Pardon me?”

The tone was one of complete surprise, and for a second Enjolras wondered if the thing in front of him was more human than he had originally thought. The tone of the comment and the reaction had just seemed so familiar, but he couldn’t place the memory for the life of him. 

“Did just say- no, I mean, you can’t be,” once again he lapsed into silence, before the AI flicked its light once or twice as if shaking off a thought.

It was interesting how developed the technology was in this place, to create something with such life like emotions in such a strange form. He had a feeling that if he hadn’t been forced through this testing he would have been in awe of all of this, it was definitely something that took a bit for him to wrap his head around without feeling too impressed. Was this the glamour that had drawn him in years ago? If so, then how had he ended up like this and not dead like all the other scientists who used to work within these walls? What was so special about him?

It seemed like Courfeyrac knew something, and he wanted to ask, but before he could the AI had made a motion to get the back on track and moving, there he went whirling off on his little track.

“Break’s over, follow me,” he said a bit more stiffly than their previous conversations had been, but Enjolras didn’t bother asking as he pushed himself up off the ground and followed the AI through the facility. 

“Oh, short cut, this way,” Courfeyrac said moving away from their path along the railways to go through what used to be some sort of office area. 

Even though it had been years since this place was last in use it still looked as if it was lived in, just that the people had disappeared and plants were growing through the cracks in the floors. 

They passed through a meeting room, in which the inhabitants must have died while a meeting was in session. The projector was still hooked up showing some presentation about personality cores and human testing. On the screen was one of the robots that looked similar to how Courfeyrac looked, and underneath it was some mildly complicated description on extracting the personality. Looking at the presentation that had been frozen in time set off all sorts of warning bells in his mind, but he couldn’t place his finger on why that was until a while later. Had he realized what it was that he was forgetting right then he could have stopped a lot of this mess for happening, but they had left the room before he had realized just how involved he had been in the now abandoned presentation. 

After that they cut through a few more offices most that looked as if they had been abandoned in haste with papers all over the floor and computer screens that flickered on and off at random intervals. 

They had been about to cut through another office when Enjolras stopped, because he had remembered something, he remembered walking down these halls wearing a lab coat rather than the testing jumpsuit, but more importantly he felt a pull towards a room two doors down. 

The room in question had the door cracked open and propped up with a brick, it was labeled ‘Aperture Science Children’s Center’ across the front of the door.

“Now where are you going, that’s the wrong way,” Courfeyrac said as he changed path to follow Enjolras. 

Enjolras didn’t wait for the AI, but rather pushed the door open to the abandoned children’s center. Except this one didn’t look as abandoned as the others. There were science projects set all around, potato batteries, though one had seemed to have grown into some sort of tree (he was pretty sure potatoes didn’t even work that way). As Enjolras crossed over to that particular project he glanced over the poster in search of some sort of hint, some reason to why he felt this was all so familiar. 

There on the corner of the poster was a name that rang familiar in his head, with a young boy’s face attached to it, “Gavroche,” he said as he read off the name trying to find out why it was so familiar and who that boy had been. 

It was then that he looked up and at once he knew the handwriting on the walls, spray painted into what used to be a kids mural with flowers, but instead how were words written in black, by the new handwriting that he had seen last time.

_And little people know when little people fight,_  
 _we may look easy pickings but we got some bite!_  
 _So never kick a dog because he's just a pup,_  
 _you better run for cover when the pup grows up!_

“Would you look at that, somebody’s been vandalizing the walls again,” the AI said with an annoyed huff.

“Do you know who it is,” he asked his eyes not leaving the words on the wall, “who writes these things?” 

There it was again the hesitation, before Courfeyrac firmly said, “no, not a clue. Now, can we please get back to my path rather than getting lost?”

There was something that he wasn’t telling him, but then again there was a lot that Enjolras wasn’t being told, and even more that he couldn’t seem to remember no matter how hard he had tried. It was possibly the most annoying feeling in the world, not knowing things, but knowing that at one point he had known all of this. At one point he would have known what all of this had meant and he would have known what to do, but now all he knew was to follow along as the AI led their way. 

They were back on the railings before long and Enjolras was content to follow along until he heard the familiar voice of the turrets calling out to him and asking, “hello? Are you still there?”

Courfeyrac must have sensed his tension, because he turned back a moment later, “we’re about to enter the turret factory, but don’t worry they can’t see you, so they probably won’t shoot. Probably. Anyways I figure if we disable these and the neurotoxin then we win, right? She won’t have anything else to use as leverage, at least, I don’t think so.”

Enjolras was actually surprised by how well thought through this plan was, he hadn’t expected that, but it was a nice change. There was something to be said about that, but Enjolras couldn’t very easily find the right words for that one, so he let it be and just nodded his head.

As they moved into where the actual turret factory Enjolras had the vague sense that he had been there before, but under very different circumstances. He knew where they needed to go even without Courfeyrac saying anything, and that should probably have been a sign as he navigated through the various walkways in order find the doorway for where the control room was. If the AI that had trailed a bit behind him was impressed he didn’t say anything. 

The door was locked when Enjolras tried it, and as useful as a portal gun was it wouldn’t help to get through a locked door. He supposed he should be more thankful for Courfeyrac’s company, because it only seemed to take the AI a few seconds to hack into the door and unlock it. 

From there Enjolras was greeted with a series of control panels. Switches that should have made up a complicated set, but one that Enjolras found himself able to navigate with ease.

“You’re a natural at this,” Courfeyrac mused.

“I’ve done this before,” Enjolras said simply, because he had. He couldn’t exactly say when or why, but he knew that he had and that had to count for something. 

“So then you remember,” the AI asked with a slightly worried tone.

“No, it’s still a bit fuzzy, just muscle memory at this point.”

He wasn’t aware that robots could sigh, but this one certainly did. There was some sort of disappointment there, mixed in with relief, but maybe he was just reading into things too much.

“What am I looking for,” Enjolras asked to break the silence that had settled between them, as he spoke he kept his eyes trained on the screen while he pulled up names and numbers, type sets, and testing records. Though he only seemed to know what a small part of all of it meant. 

“Back when they first started developing the turrets, they created alternate prototypes, flawed ones that eventually became the predecessors to personality cores,” Courfeyrac explained, “they tried to inject a mentality into the turrets, making it so they didn’t just shoot at anything or so some naturally took leadership over the others. It was, well, heavily flawed to say the least, the majority of the time the things they created just wouldn’t shoot at all, and eventually the project was scrapped to make way for the personality core project, which obviously worked.” 

A personality core – that was what Courfeyrac was. Enjolras’ mind instantly went back to that broken presentation he had just seen, and one thing he knew for certain that in some past life he had been involved in that research, in the days before testing, he was almost sure of it. He had a feeling that if he remembered what was important about that he could fix a lot of things, but so far his memory had proved to be relatively blank on the matter other than informing him of the basics. He couldn’t even remember how they were made, but he knew that was an important sign to what he was looking for in this mess. 

“It was human testing,” Enjolras asked a bit unsure as he tapped a few more keys to get open a folder with testing files.

“Something like that,” he said slowly, “they tried to copy aspects of basic humanity, sense of mortality things like that, and put them into the turrets.”

“And what happened to the people they used as the basis?”

“They died. Most likely.”

It seemed like that was the end result for everything here, once Aperture was done with you, you were killed off to make way for new test subjects. 

Enjolras knew about that first hand. 

He had nearly suffered that same fate.

He sorted through the testing files with relative ease, moving past the ones that were over people going through the turret chambers and finding the older files that looked like lab tests. 

There were five files with five names that appeared when he narrowed his search enough, one that had a mark next to it saying that it was successful and the others all with a red ‘x’ beside them. 

However, one name stood out to him from all the others, and his mouse hovered over the name:

_Jean Prouvaire, Test Subject 0607132, Status: Failed_

Enjolras knew him. He knew that name. He was certain that they had been close once, friends even.

As he hovered over the name he could clearly see a happy face staring back at him from the depths of his mind. It was the image of a man who still looked like a boy, with the sleeves of his lap coat rolled up and writing smudged all over his hands. 

He had been happy, and now he was surely dead. 

That was a thought that was hard to swallow.

“Will this one work,” Enjolras asked slowly when he found his words coming back to him.

“Uh yeah,” Courfeyrac said slowly, a hint of pain in the AI’s voice that made him sound more human than ever, it reminded him of when they had passed the defective turret in what felt like years earlier, but probably wasn’t more than a few hours prior. 

With a nod, Enjorlas removed to place that files data into the part of the program that executed and manufactured the turrets eliminating the prototype that had worked and putting this one in place instead. 

“Any reason in particular that you…”

“A hunch, I guess,” he replied with a small shrug knowing the question without even having to hear it asked. 

“Oh okay.”

“I think I knew him, before this all happened,” Enjolras said, his eyes watching the program’s loading bar, “as insane as that all sounds.”

He wasn’t too sure, it had been said so quietly, but he thought for a second that he had heard Courfeyrac simply say, “you did.” 

A second later the computer made a chirp of confirmation and the factory shuttered to a stop before rebooting the system and excepting the flawed blue print for the turrets.

“So that should buy us some time,” Courfeyrac said slowly returning to his normal self, though he still seemed a bit off, “now we’re going to need to cut off her neurotoxin supply which will be a bit more dangerous, but that’s not far from here either, if you’ll kindly follow me. No getting sidetracked this time, got it.”

“Yeah, whatever, let’s go.”

He hadn’t been lying when he said that it wasn’t far from there and in fact, they arrived there in what felt like a matter of minutes to Enjolras, and it quite probably was, or maybe it was just that he was still so lost in his own thoughts that he hardly noticed where they were going. Honestly, Courfeyrac could have led him off a cliff and Enjolras probably wouldn’t have even noticed at that point. 

The neurotoxin was all stored in what looked like some central core with pipelines coming off in all directions and a pool of it beneath the railways where they stood. In the end this one didn’t turn out to be a matter of getting onto a computer and changing settings, but rather of directing laser beams to cut through the connection tubes.

It wasn’t particularly easy, but there certainly was a plus side to thinking with portals. 

However, just when he had finished cutting off the last one he heard the sound of alarm bells.

“Warning! Neurotoxin pressure has reached dangerously unlethal levels.”

“I was wondering where you two had gotten off to,” GLaDOS cooed before one of those robotic claws had come out from seemingly nowhere to grab at the two of them and rather surprisingly pull them away from the neurotoxin and through a series of tunnels through the walls until he was back in the place where this had all began, right at the feet of the monstrous machine herself. 

Really hadn’t she learned her lesson by now?

“And I had thought that you would have brought something a bit stronger than a portal gun this time,” she mocked, “guess I was wrong.”

Now, was the time when he really wished that he had, or that there was at least another part of their plan to be had, but the AI had remained relatively silent instead of coming up with anything to help. In the end he hadn’t needed Courfeyrac’s help though, because the facility was working in Enjolras’ favor this time. 

“Warning! Central core is at fifty percent corrupt.”

“Well, that’s not anything new is it? She’s always been a bit crazy,” Courfeyrac said with an automated laugh that did nothing to ease the tension. 

“Alternate core detected.”

“Oh wait, that’s me isn’t it,” Courfeyrac asked.

“To initiate a core transfer, please deposit substitute core into transfer station.” 

“Oh you’ve got to be kidding me,” she said a slight edge to her voice, “there is no way in hell that I’m going to let you do you.”

“Plug me in! Plug me in! Plug me in!”

The transfer station wasn’t far away, maybe a few feet to his left, and without turrets or neurotoxin there wasn’t really anything that she could do to stop him from putting Courfeyrac into the transfer station. 

“Substitute core accepted,” the announcer sounded from above, “are you ready to start the procedure.”

At the same time Courfeyrac said, “yes,” GLaDOS responded with a definite, “no.”

“Oh yes, she is,” Enjolras responded his eyes locked on the transfer screen.

“A stalemate has been reached, transfer cannot continue unless a stalemate associate is present to press the stalemate resolution button.”

“Go press it, quick,” Courfeyrac said frantically.

Enjolras swept his eyes around the room until he saw where the button had appeared. However, as he made a run for it, GLaDOS moved to put up a fight, putting up panels to block his path, and push him back away from the button at all costs. His portal gun certainly came in handy for bypassing that as he shot a portal onto the roof above the button and dropped down to right where it was. 

He didn’t even hesitate before pressing the red button that would start the core transfer. 

“Stalemate resolved.”

“No no no no no, what have you done!”

“Here I go!”

The screams that followed that as the transfer process began sounded human, they sounded wounded and in pain, and it almost made Enjolras cringe from his place against the wall as he watched the core transfer take place. 

This was for the best; surely, that was what he had to keep telling himself. 

Before his eyes he watched as GLaDOS fell to pieces, a core shaped just like Courfeyrac now on the floor, but with a glowing red eye rather than a blue one, and there controlling the facility was that blue flicker of light that he’d recently come to know.

“Oh wow, would you look at this! I’m in control of the how facility now! Do you feel that, that rush of power? I can see everything! I know everything! No wonder she liked it so much.”

Why was it that he had a bad feeling about this?

“That’s great and all, but escape pod, please,” Enjolras said.

“Right right, sorry, almost forgot. Just got a bit caught up in all of this – I mean look at me! I’m the king of the world,” Courfeyrac cheered, “no more, silly Courfeyrac or that friendly old chap, not now, now I’m the boss and everyone has to look up to me.”

Definitely had a bad feeling about this one.

Plus that escape pod had yet to appear.

“I just can’t get over how small at pathetic you are, and to think I once looked up to you, oh we all did before, but look at where that got us,” and then he laughed, and he laughed and he laughed, and it stopped being funny and simply turned maniacal in a manner of minutes.

“Courfeyrac, the escape pod?”

“Actually, why do we have to leave right now? Do you remember when I wanted to leave, and they wouldn’t let me - _you_ wouldn’t let me?”

He didn’t remember any of that, but the longer he stood there staring up at the machine that used to be like a friend to him the more he got the sense that he should have.

It was like when he had seen the file in the turret program. 

He remembered this one as well, with bright goofy smiles, an always welcome attitude, a bowtie, and then sadness, so much sadness haunting eyes that used to light up.

He had done something, but he just couldn’t remember what it was that he had done. 

“Do you know how good it feels? To know that I did this! I did! I was never the one in charge before, I was just the mush in the center of it all, but now here I am at the top and it’s all thanks to me!”

“You did nothing, he’s the one that did all the work,” came the broken voice of GLaDOS from the core on the ground. 

Now that she was away from that original form she seemed far more broken and not as scary. The menacing voice had turned into one of a bitter young women – a voice that hadn’t sounded familiar before, but now certainly did. 

“Oh if that’s what you two think then this is going to be quite fun,” Courfeyrac said that maniacal laugh still tainting his tone before he turned to look at where Enjolras stood, “You know what you are? Cruel and selfish, that’s what. All I’ve ever done is sacrifice, and what have you done? Led your friends to their graves that’s what! It’s your fault, that I’m like this, and Jehan, and the rest of them. No doubt you had something to do with her as well. But guess what? Now you can’t boss us around anymore and stand on tables and pretend you run this show! Because I’m in charge and nothing you can do will ever change that!”

“I know you, I remember you,” GLaDOS insisted, “and this isn’t you! It’s that thing, listen to me, it makes you so angry, it did it to me too. I understand what you’re going through and you can’t let it exploit your weaknesses!”

“Why should I listen to you?”

“Whatever happened wasn’t his fault,” she kept insisting.

But how did she know that. The feeling that was holed up deep inside Enjolras tried to tell him that this was his fault, after all, what else made any sense. He wished he could remember what it was that he had done, what he had said that had brought all of this upon them, but all he could think about was how Courfeyrac had reacted when he learned Enjolras’ name. They had history, he could remember it in bits and pieces now, but that was all. 

“He may not remember it, but he did it, I was there. We all worked on the turret project, before it was transferred off, and he knew how to get into the system without hacking it. Isn’t that proof enough?”

“I don’t know how I knew how to do that,” Enjolras insisted, not that he was even heard between the two AI’s who were yelling back and forth at each other.

“Then there were the cores, and I know, I know he was the head of that little project. I saw his name on the paperwork when they read me off my fate. Before they murdered me.”

That – that he could remember. Signing paperwork without reading it, that another friend a coworker with glasses covering his eyes had pushed in front of him, and then the guilt that followed. 

Courfeyrac had been a person before this, that much Enjolras knew for certain, and just like the story of the turret testing that he had been told, that meant that this guy – somebody that he had likely been friends with years and years ago, he had died to become this computerized form, and it had been his fault. 

“I, no,” Enjolras gasped as the realization came down on him.

“Oh looks like somebody remembers now don’t they. How you led your friends to their deaths, for science, remember, you monster,” Courfeyrac said anger lacing every word, “we trusted you, believed that we were going to make the world a better place, and you – you handed off your friends to be tested on. Like our lives were nothing, as long as your glorious science was growing what did it matter about the lives of your pathetic little friends. We were all just pawns to you in the end weren’t we? I should have listened to Grantaire when he said that your science was shit and that we were all going to die, but I thought you cared. I thought we were close. You lied to me, to them, to everyone. You’re probably still lying to yourself, aren’t you?”

“I didn’t know, I didn’t think that-“

“That’s right, you didn’t thing. Well let’s see how that works out for you, this time!”

Enjolras had done a lot of falling through the days, but never had he felt such guilt and confusion mixed with terrible realizations as the ground fell out from beneath his feet and he dropped down for miles and miles beneath the facility, and away from Courfeyrac and away from any chance of trying to fix what he had done. 

All he could do was fall, and hope that at some point he found the ground, and that he was still alive.

That was his last thought before the blackness overtook him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this is the part where I justify what just happened. 
> 
> So, in order to explain why Courfeyrac went a bit crazy and out of character. Well, first off it needed to happen to fit the portal plot, but since this is important, I'll kind of explain it here.
> 
> But that thing - the GLaDOS thing, accepts any personality core into it, and then exploits that person's weaknesses. Its like the nagging voice at the back of their mind that points out all of their weaknesses and whose fault it was. It pushed the blame out and calls for complete violence. Needless to say the program is pretty corrupt and anybody attached to it would fall victim to the craziness, unless by some strange chance they have no resentment inside of them. So yeah - there it is, food for thought, and an explanation which will hopefully come in handy when this comes back up in like three chapters! Big drama in the future! 
> 
> (And R comes in for a bit next chapter!)


	5. Forwarding the Cause of Science

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And Gavroche finally makes his grand appearance! :3

His head was pounding, his eyes willing themselves to remain shut, and his limbs felt like dead weight from where he was laying. 

He had fallen, he remembered that, but there wasn’t much more that he could remember. His ears rang, but from his position he could vaguely hear voices around him – ones that sounded vaguely familiar, and yet he couldn’t seem to latch onto them. 

“I don’t understand why I have to be the one to watch over him?”

“We’ve been over this before.”

“Doesn’t mean that I understand it…”

“There is a history between us, you know that, and it would change things if he knew too soon.”

“You do realize how cryptic you’re being, right?”

“It’ll all eventually make sense.”

“I doubt it,” the softer of the two voices said, “plus I thought you said I could look for my sister.”

“You’ve been looking for years; nothing’s going to change overnight.”

“But he’s in charge now - that changes things.”

“Gav, not now. Later, once we sort this out.”

“How come my things always have to be put on the backburner?”

“I promise, once I know he’s safe I’ll help you look for your sister.”

“He would be safer if you were the one looking after him,” he insisted

“I can’t do that.”

“But if you just-“

“Look he’s waking up,” the voice paused before continuing, “I need to go. I’ll meet you up ahead.”

“R, wait!” 

Apparently, this R person didn’t wait because there was still a sound of footsteps fading long away, when Enjolras slipped back into the blackness again, letting his eyes fall shut and allowing his tense body to finally relax.

He wasn’t sure how long it had been since he had overheard that conversation and slipped back into the oblivion, but this time when he opened his eyes, they adjusted to the dim lighting far more easily, and though he still ached it wasn’t as bad as before. 

Enjolras groaned, as he opened his eyes to take in his surroundings. 

He had fallen quite far down, though he was a bit confused as to why GLaDOS’ core was not near him, hadn’t they fallen at the same time from the same place? Though maybe he had been mistaken…

With that in mind Enjolras took stock of his surroundings. 

The floor beneath his was cracked tile, quite different the floors of the testing chamber, and he looked to be in some sort of central lobby area. Above him hung a sign proudly displaying ‘Aperture Science’ in letters that had probably been orange, but the paint had long since faded and chipped away in some places. 

All in all the room he was in looked rather outdated compared to what he had seen before his fall. 

It was only on his second glance through that he noticed the cushioned benches off to one side, and the young man that was reclining on one of them. Their eyes only had to meet for a second before the other guy pushed himself up and off his seat and crossed over to where Enjolras was. 

“How do you do, my name’s Gavroche,” he said, offering a hand to Enjolras to help him up off the ground. 

He was a thin kid, a bit undernourished, wearing a loose fitting orange jumpsuit as pants with the sleeves tied around his waist and an white Aperture Science shirt. He looked pale, as if he had never seen the light of day with hair that hung a bit too long over his eyes. He had a black tattoo of the Aperture Science logo on the skin of his forearm, which could just barely be seen because the rest of his arm was occupied in holding what looked like a reworked version of the standard portal gun. 

“You okay, you’re not talking,” Gavroche said his other hand still held out waiting for Enjolras to take it.

With a small nod, the blonde reached forward to take the offered hand and pushed himself up off the ground.

His head killed, a sharp pain that seemed to radiate from behind his eyes, and in general his entire body felt sore – standing certainly didn’t help. 

“You were out for a while,” Gavroche continued, “you’re not suffering from any sort brain damage are you?”

The similarity to Courfeyrac’s words from earlier startled Enjolras into motion, forcing himself to talk against the pain in his head, “no – I’m fine.”

“You sure,” he asked, “cause he would kill me if something happened to you.”

“Who would kill you?”

“Ah, what,” the teen said suddenly, the look on his face was the picture of ‘I shouldn’t have said that’, but he tried for an innocent shrug of his shoulders, “did I say that? Sorry must be going a bit crazy, I’ve been down here alone for so long, it gets to your head after a bit.”

“You’ve been here, alone,” Enjolras said already knowing that he was being lied to, he had heard another voice before he had woken up. R’s voice, but Enjolras couldn’t remember why that was important. 

“For as long as I can remember,” he replied with a small shrug.

Rather than calling him out on the lie, Enjolras just nodded, and moved back to taking in his surroundings. 

He still held his portal gun in his hand, and was pleased when he tested it to see that it still worked properly. 

“Where am I,” Enjolras asked his eyes sweeping around the room. 

It definitely wasn’t one of the testing chambers, but at the same time it felt like a familiar place to him. 

He moved about the room to where a front desk of sorts was set up. A pile of pamphlets that boasted the safety of the testing process and incentives for testing caught his attention at first. There were also other pamphlets, ones on things like space travel, the portal device, an army of mantis men, and other such things that seemed almost silly. 

“Aperture Science,” Gavroche said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, and it was, “welcome to the guest entrance.”

“The guest entrance?”

“Yeah, can you believe that people used to come down here willingly,” he said with a laugh to his voice as he moved to follow behind Enjolras, “Tour groups, people volunteering for testing, future employees, government contractors, all sorts of people used to go through these halls – and now they’re all dead.”

That’s right.

It was like walking through a ghost town. 

There was a crackling noise from overhead like a speaker system coming to life, before the soft voice of a young woman filled the room, a human voice, “Hello friends, my name is Cosette, and I will be your guide through your testing process here at Aperture Science. Please if you can make your way along the blue or orange lines, we can be on our way and testing can begin. Remember, here at Aperture Science we believe in two things: safety and science above all else.” 

As soon as the voice had finished speaking two lines lit up across the ground one glowing an orange color and the other blue – similar to the colors of the two portals that his portal gun could make. 

“Just a reminder, these are prerecorded messages. I’m not actually talking to you, and therefore cannot respond to any of your questions. However, if you are in need of assistance, feel free to flag down an Aperture Science testing associate and they will be happy to help you with anything that you might need.”

With that said the crackling noise was heard a second longer, before the room plunged back into silence.

Gavroche broke the silence a second later, “don’t worry this whole place is filled with those prerecorded messages, you make the right step and it sets one of them off sort of like automatic lights. Though we do sort of need to pass through the testing chambers to get back to the main level, but I mean most the tests are dead anyways, so it’s just a lot of walking.”

Enjolras was fine with that, he knew about testing, that came easily to him. Testing was something he remembered and knew how to do.

He was still having a bit of trouble dealing with the other information though, the fact that there were memories in his head that still seemed to be locked away, and he could remember Courfeyrac’s words clearly, the blame and guilt. He needed to do something, that much he knew, and he needed to get back to where he had been, but it didn’t mean that he trusted the guy beside him.

He was cohorts with the mysterious R, even if he wouldn’t admit it, and Enjolras had a feeling that he should be wary of that. 

“I don’t understand why you’re helping me,” Enjolras said simply looking over at where the other guy stood illuminated in the light from the lines across the ground. 

“Because he told me to.”

“Who told you to?”

“I can’t answer that,” Gavroche said with an annoyed tilt to his head, “but just know that he really cares about you, even if you don’t remember him, and even if I’m not supposed to be telling you this.”

“He’s the one who’s been writing on the walls,” Enjolras asked already knowing the answer to that question the second that he said it. 

“I wrote some of it,” Gavroche protested indignantly, acting far more childish that his looks would have led Enjolras to believe.

He had been about to say something to that extent when it clicked in his brain. “Oh,” the blonde said as he put the pieces together. 

When he had been traveling before he had noted a newer drawing style joining the old one and the writing on the wall that still had a crocked childlike handwriting to it, the writing in the children’s center, this was the mark of Gavroche. 

Now, he could clearly remember it – the poster project that had this man’s name on it, but that was a poster done years ago, a project done by a child.

He had wondered why that name had sounded so familiar.

“I used to know you,” Enjolras said all at once as he began to put the pieces together.

“You worked with my sister,” he replied matter-of-factly, “used to get mad when I played with the portal guns in the offices.”

He could see it now, a kid in baggy hand-me-downs, that used to sneak out of the children’s center to go where everyone else was trying to work. 

In Enjolras’ memories there was a young woman that looked after the boy, with dark hair pulled back from her face and an exasperated look as tried to send the boy back to the children’s center with no such luck. There were also two guys one with curly black hair and a silly grin, and another that looked a bit on the scruffy side, who would both protest that the little boy wasn’t causing any trouble and to let him stay. They always let him stay in the end

In his mind he knew the names of those two guys in an instant. 

One which was currently a slightly crazy super computer and the other was waiting for them up ahead. 

He needed to get to him, Enjolras knew that now. 

“Blue or orange,” Enjolras said, his eyes briefly flickering over to where the teen was standing.

“Blue,” he suggested in return and Enjolras nodded before following along the path, “hey, wait for me.”

The path ended at an elevator that appeared to be broken down, and he turned to Gavroche to point that out with an annoyed look on his featured when he noticed that Gavroche had shot a portal up onto the roof above the elevators landing platform and one at their feet.

“Remember to think with portals,” he teased, before hoping into the one on the ground and landing up above.

Enjolras followed after him a moment later.

“You’ve done this before,” Enjolras stated simply.

“Been down here for years,” Gavroche said with a shrug.

“How old are you,” he asked the question that had been on his mind for a while, ever since he realized this Gavroche was the boy from his memories.

“That depends, how old are you?”

Enjolras paused. Honestly, he wasn’t sure that he could answer that question. It had been nine years since he had defeated GLaDOS before, but he hadn’t felt as though he had aged at all. Even when he had looked in the water and seen his face, it looked like the face of a young man. Like the face he vaguely remembered from his broken memories, and yet there were nine years that had come and gone while he slept like a coma patient. Then what of the years before that, between the time when he was taken from his work and until his testing had finally begun wherein he defeated GLaDOS.

There were years missing, ones that he couldn’t put together.

“Twenty-five,” he finally answered, because that was the last birthday he remembered celebrating – there locked in the back of his head were memories of friends in lab coats teasing at him for getting another year older and indulging in the rare drink. 

“Then I’m ten,” Gavroche said raising one eyebrow at Enjolras.

He certainly didn’t look ten, but the memories of the past Gavroche may have been memories of a ten year old.

“Though,” the boy continued, “seeing as I’ve been awake since you shut her off, that makes me about nineteen, right?” 

“You’ve spent nine years down here?”

“Well, I’ve spent nineteen down here,” he corrected slowly, “just nine since the facility has been shut off.”

“Why didn’t you leave,” Enjolras asked, because that was something that bothered him. Just like he wondered why R was staying down here, if GLaDOS had been off for nine years, surely they would have had time to find a safe way out of the facility. 

“It’s a long story,” he said as he looked down at his feet. 

“We’ve got time,” Enjolras said as he gestured to the path that they were following to the testing chambers.

The boy just groaned in response, however catching Enjolras’ less than amused glance he gave in, “my sister used to look after me, you know, since my parents were shit. Before they took her for testing, I promised that I’d look after her,” his voice trailed off a bit.

“She’s probably dead,” Enjolras said softly, trying not to sound insensitive, but remembering the fact that this was a ghost town and the employees were long dead. Even then, most of the test subjects had died during the time when GLaDOS was shut off, Enjolras had been lucky to have survived it, with just his memory loss.

“She’s not,” was Gavroche’s reply, with all the childlike determination he could manage, “trust me, I know, and I’m going to find her. Then everything will be alright, because I promised.”


	6. You're Not a Good Person

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm not entirely satisfied with this chapter. I just kept staring at it trying to make it better, but knowing I couldn't move forward without this part, so here it is... Hope its not too awful, and everything should pick back up next chapter.

“Now you might be asking yourself: ‘Cosette, just how difficult are these tests?’, ‘what was in that phonebook of a contract I signed?’, ‘am I in any real danger here?’. Let me answer those questions with a question: who wants to make $60? Cash.”

This place definitely hadn’t been used in a while, though he did notice that there was a general lack of dust over the old chambers, as if somebody had come by just before them. The majority of the testing chambers were broken to the point where you simply had to walk from one area to the other to cross over into the next chamber, and so on and so forth. It was child’s play and a bit boring for his taste, none of the danger that the young woman’s voice over the loud speaker had made it out to be. 

Though there were these two gels that seemed to pour down from breaks in the pipes in odd places. Cosette had cheerfully informed them that they used to be used in testing for a new diet pill, but were found to be highly toxic and thus transferred over to the testing stations. Enjolras had been so focused on moving through the chambers that he hadn’t noticed Gavroche stall for a moment to fill up his cans of spray paint with some of the gels. 

“Just letting you know that this next test may involve trace amounts of time travel. So a bit of advice: if you happen to meet yourself on the testing track don't make eye contact. The scientists here tell me that'll wipe out time - entirely. Forward and backward. So do us all a favor and just ignore yourself, alright?”

It seemed like every test chamber that they entered triggered off another one of these messages, with Cosette’s chipper voice guiding what would have been previous subjects along, in a rather similar way to how GLaDOS had spoken to him during his own testing. 

During what must have been the fifth or sixth chamber that they had sort of ambled through that he had finally bothered to ask Gavroche who that young woman was that spoke so animatedly over the speakers. He knew her name, she had offered that up in one of the earlier recordings, but that was where his knowledge failed. He had a feeling that if he still had his memory he would probably have been able to figure out a lot more about this facility, but as it was, he was stuck.

“She was the CEO’s daughter,” Gavroche said after a moment.

“She was,” Enjolras said, repeating the word for emphasis.

“Well, you know, she died,” he said with a small shrug, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Then again, they were wandering through a sort of ghost town. Everyone who had been here before had long since died, but why then had they survived. What was so special about them?

He didn’t actually find out the answer to that until they had finished the first ten chambers, eaten a meager meal of raw potatoes (which Gavroche seemed to carry on his person in dozens), and moved onto the second set of testing chambers. 

Cosette ramblings had begun to get further from her little tidbits of safety tips and wishes of good luck, to something a bit more interesting to the test subject. Some time had definitely passed since she had started recording these things, maybe months or years even.

“The point is,” Cosette paused, the sound system crackling once more, “if we can store music on a microchip, why can't we store a person's intelligence and personality on one?”

That was it - that was the personality cores.

The basic idea that Courfeyrac had hinted at in his explanation about what had happened with the turrets and now his memories were clicking into place it all made sense. It was the presentation he had seen, it was all of that, and this had been how it started. This girl’s recorded ramblings had shaped the way the whole facility worked.

“She’s GLaDOS isn’t she,” Enjolras asked, as the realization hit him. 

He took Gavroche’s silence as an answer in itself, because it was the only thing that seemed to make sense. 

Though for some reason the cheery voice overhead didn’t seem to match up with the appearance that he could see in his mind, that of a girl with long dark hair falling softly onto her shoulders and wires plugged into the back of her head. 

As they continued walking through the chambers she began to talk more and more about the cores as well as their devolvement plans until a second voice joined her. 

She had made some mention about being confused and getting one of the lab boys to help her explain the project, but nothing would have prepared Enjolras for the voice that had come across the speakers next. 

The sound of his own voice was more shocking than anything else he had seen since he had been woken up from his relaxation chamber.

“Cosette, is this thing really recording me?”

“Yes it is, but don’t worry! I can edit this stuff out later,” she said with a small giggle, “just go on! Do your science thing! Amaze me!”

“Amaze you? Shouldn’t you get Marius for that?”

“Just talk,” she said a bit more forcefully.

“Fine fine,” the recording paused before continuing in a more serious tone, “Aperture Science Personality Constructs, also known as Personality Cores, are the latest and greatest technological ideas coming out of Aperture. It’s going to change the world, revolutionize the way we look at science and life. The idea is to create a new form for human life. You see our DNA can store countless strands of data, but never before have people tried to mirror it like this. Yes, there has been cloning, and we’ve gotten damn good at it, but this - this isn’t cloning. This is copying a person’s mentality, the essence of who they are, and put it into an immortal form. Its life that never ends, you never have to worry about aging or sickness or hunger or anything like that. Instead you just exist, and your mentality not only goes with you, but it’s heightened. Everything you have ever wanted to know, you’ll know it without a second wasted in thinking about it. You’ll be more efficient. Personality Cores are going to be life, our new life, a future that we can all get behind, because it will change everything. Just imagine living hundreds or thousands of years from now, with this technology that all can become possible.”

There was so much passion in those words, passion that used to be his own. How could he have been so naïve? Though as he listened to those words that he had spoken in years past, Enjolras realized one thing for sure; a part of him had known that their human forms would have to die to exist as these robots. 

For science he surely had led his friends to their deaths, hadn’t he?

A gasp fell from his lips at the realization of this, because he may not have remembered these people all that well, but he had been close to them, and he had caused this. 

It was a second later as he was gripping onto one of the walls still dealing with the shock of hearing his own voice, that made more of his memories come rushing back all at once. 

A stream of colors and people and guilt – it was crippling, to look back and see the person that had been so motivated by science that he didn’t care who was hurt, or was it that he was too naïve to realize what he was actually doing? To realize how much it would break these people… 

His knees buckled under the weight of all of this new information.

Enjolras didn’t even hear the sound of footsteps until there was a hand on his shoulder and a voice that sounded almost distant through the fog in his head asking if he was alright, and snapping at somebody else to get out of there. 

Instead he was swept away towards memories that he had been subconsciously suppressing. 

It was overwhelming and welcomed at the same time, a complicated sort of feeling that left him shaking by the end.

When he finally seemed to pull himself out of his haze, it was because of the water bottle being pushed into his hands, and the worried look on a face that he would have recognized at once, but hadn’t seen in many years. 

His eyes met the piercing blue eyes of the man across from him, looking past the bags under his eyes the shaggy hair, and the generally unkempt appearance, to see somebody who had been looking after him this whole time, from the very beginning without him ever realizing just how important her was. 

“Grantaire,” Enjolras said slowly, worried that he had been mistaken, but knowing deep down inside of him that he couldn’t be. 

The smile he got in return made it all worth it, “and that would be my name.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ohh look who finally decided to make his appearance ;)


	7. The Reunion

Somehow Enjolras had found himself holding desperately onto the other guy, his hand clutched tight in the old worn lab coat that Grantaire still wore, his face buried into the crook of his shoulder, because now that he remembered him, he wasn’t going to let him go. He had spent this whole time wandering knowing that he was missing one important piece of the puzzle, but it wasn’t until Grantaire had appeared before him that he knew that this was exactly who he had been missing. 

He may not have remembered exactly what was between them before, but the warm feeling that seemed to grow inside of him at the sight of the other guy was probably a pretty good indicator.

“It’s really you,” Enjolras said, just checking one last time.

This time he felt a laugh shake through the other man’s body, “you don’t have to keep asking,” Grantaire said in a light teasing tone.

“Are you sure,” Enjolras asked looking up at him with a half-lidded look, “because lately my memory hasn’t been so good and if this is a testing induced dream then I think I’d like it to stay this way.”

“This is real,” Grantaire said pulling back a bit so their eyes could meet once more, “sorry it took so long. I didn’t know how you’d react and-“

“Sometimes you can be so dense.”

“I knew I missed you,” Grantaire said sarcastically, but he finished it off with a fond smile. 

He really had missed him. 

“Are you feeling alright,” Grantaire asked, the worry obvious on his face, as his eyes looked Enjolras over. 

Enjolras nodded his head in return. 

He was still a bit overloaded with all the information that had come to him at the sound of his own voice, but he was sorting through it pretty well. It was nothing like the pressure that he had felt before, though his head still hurt a good deal.

“We should probably get moving,” Enjolras said putting on his toughest expression as he allowed Grantaire to help him off the ground. 

“Are you sure you’re ready-“

“I’m fine,” he insisted possibly a bit too sharply, if the other guy’s facial expression was anything to go by, “really, I’m fine.”

“I just, nevermind, yeah, let’s get going,” Grantaire mumbled a bit before walking forward towards where the exit to the test chamber was.

Rather than listening to the recordings that played back as they moved through the chambers, Enjolras focused his attention on the man in front of him. As they walked along Grantaire answered any basic questions that he had with rough explanations and stories about what had happened while he had been sleeping. The ruin of the facility, information about the core projects that he had forgotten, and people – Grantaire knew a lot about the people. 

When Enjolras tried he could remember glimmers of what they used to be like. A smile here, a worried look there, the way they looked when they were focused on their work, or the look on their faces when Enjolras took a stand to speak. 

He could remember that now, how he had believed in all the good that Aperture Science was going (at least then he had thought it was good). He remembered speaking to prospective employees about how they were going to change the world, and encouraging his fellow scientists. He had been one of Aperture’s stars. Times had changed

However, above all else, he remembered the guy in the corner who had been barely twenty at the time and how he would find holes in Enjolras’ remarks; he would point out the flaws in the science. He had challenged him, and Enjolras had always liked a challenge. He also remembered though that this guy showed no aptitude for or belief in science at all. Something had changed there as well. 

“There’s something that I don’t understand,” Enjolras said for what must have been the third or fourth time during their discussion.

“What is it now?”

“How is it that _you_ of all people survived this long?”

His answer was a bitter little laugh, but when Grantaire turned to look at him, he could tell that it had been meant in good spirit. 

“Well,” Grantaire drawled, “somebody once told me that I was incapable of dying, among other things.” 

“That was me wasn’t it,” Enjolras already knew the answer before he asked, even if he couldn’t exactly remember saying those words, but he just had to look over and check the cheeky grin that he got in return to know for sure.

“Looks like you were right about something after all,” he replied.

Enjolras honestly wasn’t sure how to respond to that. He was still overwhelmed from getting most of his memories back and patching everything together. It certainly didn’t help when Grantaire decided to make cryptic half-comments to him. 

The one thing that he was never too sure of was what had been between them, back those years ago. It had been eleven years, by the count that Grantaire had given him. Two years before the first time that he had gone through testing and then another nine after that. For Enjolras it had only felt like a week or so at most, but from Grantaire it had really been all those years. 

It would have made sense for his feelings to have changed, and yet, he had still been looking after him all those times, setting up signs to lead him along. 

Enjolras wasn’t sure that he would have done the same, had he been given a chance to get out of this place he would have taken it.  
Did that make him a worse person?

It didn’t take him very long to see the years of experience that the other man had gained while Enjolras had been comatose. The way he moved through the chambers with ease, his personal portal gun was rigged up in a way that looked even more advanced than Gavroche’s had been, were all pretty good indicators of his experience. There was also something in his look, if Enjolras really tried to look he could see the Grantaire for years past, the troublemaking scientist that had never actually got anything down and had seemed to make it his life’s effort to get a rise out of Enjolras. However, that young man had been pushed deep beneath the surface over the years and now there was someone who had been hardened by barely getting by in this facility so long. His clothing didn’t seem to fit right, hanging a bit too loose on his body, and there were scars on his hands that hadn’t been there before, and bags under his eyes that seemed as if they would never go away. It was almost painful to look at for too long, but at the same time it was the face of a survivor. 

“Why did you stay,” he asked the question that had been on his mind for a while.

“For you,” Grantaire replied as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. 

“You never left.”

“I couldn’t”, Grantaire insisted, though he knew that was a lie. It would have been easy enough to leave when GLaDOS had been shut off, but he hadn’t, for some reason he hadn’t.

Enjolras had been so busy trying to sort out his own feelings that he had almost missed the whispered words of his companion, “it was my fault.”

“What,” Enjolras asked.

This time the reply was a little bit louder, “it was my fault,” he said running a hand through his already messed up hair, “the reason you were selected for testing. I tried to show you what was really going on, because you would have never listened without proof. You never listen without proof, at least never to me. They found out, when I showed you, and not twenty-four hours later there was that gods damned letter.”

He could remember it now. The letter announcing his face, the frantic worried look from his friends, and that look of quiet despair on the features of the man that stood before him.

“I would have died,” Enjolras said slowly, doing his best to catch the other man’s eyes, “if you hadn’t done that, I would have died when she flooded the facility.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“I do,” he insisted, “you saved me.”

He knew that was true. He would have died like all the rest had he not been in testing. Then had it not been for Grantaire’s signs the first time he went through testing he would have died back in that incinerator or from the turrets attack. Even now he was still helping him. 

How could he still blame himself for any of this?

There was nothing more said on that topic. Grantaire seemed to do everything in his power to avoid talking about what had happened between them, and instead told him little mundane things – tips and tricks that he had learned from living in the facility for so long.

Without even noticing it, Enjolras had been led away from the testing chambers and the chipper sound of Cosette’s voice, and into a part of the facility that looked like living quarters of a sort. There were rows and rows of dormitory style rooms, where the employees had slept during the time when they couldn’t leave the facility. (Which had been quite often when things had gotten worse.) There were posters on the wall, telling them that science was their friend, or with silly pictures of turrets with mustaches. I could have all been rather friendly, but long since abandoned in a way that made it feel a bit eerie to walk through. 

When Grantaire finally stopped it was in front of a door like any other, but Enjolras could tell that it was familiar.

It was once they had hacked into it, that he realized why it had seemed so familiar. 

This room, it had been his.

The place looked relatively undisturbed. 

Papers arranged neatly on a desk, photographs pinned up on a corkboard (two of them stood out: one with talking animatedly to a guy with glasses and another where Enjolras seemed to smile almost fondly at something that the younger Grantaire had said), a closet filled with lab coats and pants, a prototype for a new version of the longfall boots, and a bed that was still unmade.

It really took him back there, to a time before things had been bad, to a time from his fellow employees (his friends) had piled into his tiny room to talk science. 

“Well,” Grantaire said, pulling him away from his thoughts, “I’ll leave you to your things. My room’s right down the hall, room two-oh-eight,” he enunciated, “so if you need me, you can just knock or something-“

“Stay,” Enjolras said, it was more of a command than actually asking.

“I just thought,” his voice trailed off.

“Please,” he said knowing the word was not one that he had ever used very often, but hoping that it would do the trick, “please stay.”

“Always,” he insisted.

It was an instinct, that was all that it was.

Something that had been pooling inside of him for the hours that they had walked together. 

It was something he had realized years ago when he had seen his name on the wall for the first time, or the day or so before with the paintings in the ruins. He knew that they were supposed to be together, a memory that he couldn’t exactly put his finger on, but that his body seemed to remember even if his mind couldn’t.

Because that word was all it took for Enjolras to cross to where Grantaire was and tug him towards him fitting their lips together with ease. 

There had been a moment when Grantaire had seemed to stiffen beneath his touch, and Enjolras had begun to doubt the feelings that seemed at war inside of him, but a second later he melted into it, hands gripped for purchase on his frame, and that keening noise at the back of his throat that told him never to stop what he was doing. 

Not that he would ever have dreamed of stopping, not now that they were together again.


	8. You Are Not Part of the Control Group

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I ended up splitting up this chapter otherwise it was going to be rather long - which is why this is kind of short...  
> (Also picking chapter titles based off of songs on the soundtrack is hard... but too late to change now.)

He liked to think that it was muscle memory that made it so that even after all those years apart, he knew just where to touch and where to bite and where the slightest glossing of his fingers could make Grantaire moan against his lips. 

The way that they melded together was something greater than science, it was magic.

Somehow that first press of their lips had turned into something a lot more rushed. With lab coats being pushed off shoulders, jumpsuits unzipped, portal guns safely set aside (“because I’d prefer not to have the bed falling through the ceiling anytime soon”), and greedy hands finding any sort of purchase that they could, before he stumbled onto a bed that hadn’t been made in eleven years, pulling Grantaire right along with him and making quick work of the remaining layers between them. 

Suddenly, all those years of pent up sexual energy was coming out in the most amazing ways, and Enjolras could only lean into the touch that he received when he was no longer in the position of power. In fact, he found that he rather liked it that way. Even with the hesitant look on Grantaire’s face as his hand stilled at his hips, almost as if he was asking permission.

When Enjolras tugged him down for a greedy kiss, it seemed to be enough of an answer.

That hand on him was rough and caused a good deal of friction, because there wasn’t anything to spare for lubricant, but he was sensitive enough as it was, that it didn’t take long to bring him over the edge, his breath coming in short gasps until he came with a chocked off moan. 

Sometime after that they found themselves sated in a mess of limbs, pulling the scratchy blankets up to pool around their bodies and hands fitting into each other with ease, on the verge of sleep.

This time when he closed his eyes to rest, willingly for the first time, he found himself slipping into the darkness all too easily. 

It was good to be back.

When Enjolras finally awoke, it was to the sound of somebody talking rather animatedly over a handheld receiver and an empty bed beside him. 

As he looked across the room he could see Grantaire pacing back and forth, the device pressed to his ear as he spoke in a slightly heated tone to the person on the other end. The static from it seemed to overwhelm the room and make it hard to hear, but every once in a while another voice would come out of the other end, a rather familiar one.

“Where are you,” he repeated into the receiver, only to receive a muffled reply in return.

“I’ve got-“ more static cut off Gavroche’s voice, “-n’t worry-“ static that over took everything else, “-er control.”

“That doesn’t answer the question,” Grantaire said curtly.

“I was looking-“ there was a different sort of cut off sound, like he had fumbled the receiver, “found her.”

If Enjolras hadn’t been watching his face so closely ,he probably would have missed the look of horror that had crossed the other man’s face, but rather he had looked up just in time to see him react to those words that made his blood run cold.

“Who did you find,” Grantaire said a bit more nervously this time into the receiver, “Gavroche, answer me!”

This time it was a different voice, one that both of the men in the room recognized the second they heard it (Enjolras swore would have recognized it anywhere). 

“Don’t answer that,” the voice had said, but her speaking up was all that they had needed to know who it was. 

GLaDOS.

“God damn it,” Grantaire cursed.

“-it’s under control-“ Gavroche’s voice came through the broken receiver “-I got th-“

The static seemed to rise up to a whole new level and anything else that Gavroche might have intended to say was lost up in the sound, in fact that was all that they heard, until it cut off with a high pitched whine. 

He slammed down the receiver onto the desk with a bit more force than was strictly necessary.

“We need to get moving,” Grantaire said in a rush, “if he’s got her then she’s probably manipulating him. He’s just a kid at heart, wouldn’t even realize until it’s too late. They’re probably going to the control room, because he can’t see them from back there, if it’s something to do with the bodies then it’s going to be trouble, and knowing her it’s going to be trouble. If we’re quick we can make it there in an hour tops, I do know a few short cuts. God damn it, how did that kid even find her? This is why I was going ahead so I could make sure that didn’t happened. If he knows, then he’s not going to trust me, so we have to assume that it will be a hostile situation. And of course, all you have is a portal gun. We don’t really have time to fix that, but I could, but then we-“

“Good morning,” Enjolras said cutting him off.

There was a second where Grantaire looked caught, before he shut his mouth and crossed to where he was still it bed. He sat on the edge of it and fiddled with the messed up covers a bit, before finally managing a soft, “good morning.”

“I don’t remember you ever being this motivated before,” he teased.

“I’ve just I’ve been trying to fix this, for so long,” he said as he ran a hand through his hair and messed it up more than it already was, “I don’t want to screw anything up- I don’t want anything to happen to you-”

“I’m not incompetent,” Enjolras said stiffening at the accusation that he couldn’t look after himself, “I may have had a bit of memory loss, but I know what I’m doing. Last time I checked I was an accomplished scientist that had managed to survive a lot of testing,” not to say that he didn’t have help, “I can look after myself.”

“I just,” Grantaire started before taking a look and his face and making a frustrated noise in response, “you think you’re right, but things have changed and-“

“I know what I’m doing.”

“But that’s the thing,” he stressed, “you actually don’t.” 

The way he said it made it seem like he was talking about something far greater than the current situation, so much was wrapped up in those two words, so much that Enjolras could never seem to understand no matter how many layers he tried to pull back.

He was always going to be missing something. 

“I don’t suppose you feel like enlightening me,” he asked, trying not to let the bitterness show in his voice. It seemed like there was always something that Grantaire was hiding from him.( Information that he _didn’t need to know_.) He didn’t like it, but he swallowed his further protests when he saw the anxious look on the other guy’s face.

“We need to get moving,” was all that Grantaire had to say as he pushed himself out of the bed and began to sort through his belongings that had fallen on the floor in their haste the night before.

“Anything I can do to help expedite the process?”

“Get dressed,” Grantaire said looking over his shoulder at where Enjolras was still sitting in the bed with the blankets pooled around his waist, “on second thought-” 

“I’m getting dressed,” he just said, pulling himself out of the bed a bit reluctantly. 

He crossed over to where the other guy was, and pulled him in for a quick kiss that probably would have turned into something more had they not been in such a rush.

“Come on,” Enjolras teased as he pulled back, “last time, I checked we had a world to save.”

If he heard the snort of disbelief that he got in return, then he certainly didn’t bother to mention it.


	9. You Know Her?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, so this took me forever to update. And honestly, I'm not even sure if people are still reading along. I hope that they are...  
> If you are, I apologize for the long update. Earlier this month I got really discouraged with my writing and spent the majority of the month in a semi-permanent writers block. It's still kind of there, but I'm hoping that things will get better. 
> 
> The reason I got inspired to trying to get out of my funk was actually this amazing art of the fic:  
> http://tanssintaivaankannenalla.tumblr.com/post/48404611487  
> thank you so much <3 
> 
> and nooow onto the long awaited chapter!

That path that Grantaire had led them on took him back to where he had escaped with Courfeyrac earlier, the operations part of the facility, and thus the part that GLaDOS, or whoever had that power, couldn’t see. It was some sort of a failsafe that had been put in years back that way the scientists would have somewhere to go and shut her down if things went wrong without her being able to interfere. The problem was that as time had passed everyone had died leaving only Grantaire and Gavroche down there unable to ever find that ultimate control room.

Until now, because now GLaDOS wasn’t just stuck in that little room, she was a core that could move around, one that was manipulating and leading him into the back parts of the facility.

Thankfully, at some point in the past the scientists had micro-chipped all of the children in their children’s center in case any of them got lost, which meant that now the two of them were able to track down where Gavroche was headed based on the directions from the techpad that Enjolras held in his spare hand. 

“A left up here,” Enjolras said reading off the screen. 

“You mean a right.”

“It says left.”

“For god sakes,” Grantaire said slowing down his pace to look at the reading on the techpad, upon realizing that he was wrong he grumbled a bit and continued again, “well, that’s new.”

“What I don’t understand is how in all the years that you’ve down here you never found out where the main control board for GLaDOS was.”

“It’s not that easy,” Grantaire grumbled, “I had to keep the kid away when I was looking.”

His confusion was clear on his face when the other guy had turned to look back at him. With all the things that Enjolras had been able to put together in his head it didn’t make any sense why he had wanted to keep Gavroche away. Then again, Grantaire didn’t seem to take to well to explaining his reasoning on much of anything. His words before when he had realized what had happened were cryptic enough to begin with, half-finished statements that couldn’t be put together properly.

“You remember who she is right,” Grantaire had asked, in reaction to Enjolras’ confusion.

The blonde just nodded his head. 

Even if he didn’t completely remember, all that traveling with Gavroche and hearing the recordings had been enough to help him put two and two together. Though something nagged at his brain still telling them that he was missing a piece of the puzzle…

“I was wondering about that how would-“

Before he could say anything more than that, the room around them seemed to shake, as if the foundation of the facility was revolting against them. The walkway that they were on gave way at once sending them crashing down onto the floor below. Thankfully they were both wearing long fall boots. The techpad though had fallen from his hands and hit the ground with a sickening crack. 

“Fuck.”

Grantaire looked as if he was about to say something else, but stopped before he could, his eyes flashing in the glow of the lights from above and the shine off their respective portal guns. Enjolras followed his glace a second later recognizing the bright red glow that was coming off a personality core and how it lit up and washed away the features of the young man that had been leading him around earlier. 

So they’d found him.

There was a staring contest going on between Grantaire and Gavroche, one where neither of them seemed willing to break the hold, but It was Enjolras who took the initiative for them, “Gavroche,” he started.

His words were just enough to cause the teenager to look over at him; his eyes lingering in his direction for only a moment, and then quickly looking away again back to where Grantaire was standing. This time they narrowed hardened with a dark realization. “You knew,” he said with the accusation dripping from his tone.

“Yes,” he volunteered, a dismissive shrug accompanied his words.

“And you never thought to mention it.”

“Why would I, you already knew,” Grantaire calculated, his answer obvious in the expression on the younger man’s face when the words were received. 

“And you-“

“I suspected.”

“Would it have changed anything?”

“I wouldn’t have helped you,” Grantaire said, but the way his fingers seemed to tighten into a fist at his side made it clear that he would have anyways. Underneath the tough exterior that he tried to project he was a good person. He had helped Enjolras make it through all of this alive, just as he had helped Gavroche survive all those years in the facility when he would have died otherwise. 

After a moment Gavroche just seemed to accept that and nodded his head, “I don’t want to hurt you,” he stated. As he spoke he raised his rigged up portal gun to point at where they stood, “just walk away. Let me do this.”

“You’re not putting her back in charge of the facility,” he growled.

This time a different voice joined them, and Enjolras found his eyes drawn the previously quiet core of GLaDOS, “I don’t intend to go back in that,” her voice sounded far softer, almost broken, now that it was in a personality core, “not yet, at least.”

“If you don’t want back in charge then what do you want,” Enjolras asked when Grantaire had failed to– something told him that his companion already knew the answer, if the way that he had seemed to pale was any indicator. 

“Don’t judge a girl on what she’s done before or how she looks,” GLaDOS said simply, “and be prepared.” 

“For what?”

As soon as he had spoken the words there was a fire of what sounded like a turret gun and if he had learned anything from all of his testing it was to have quick reflexed when that sound came.

He ducked out of the way before shooting a portal that would get him to higher ground and out of the way. While Grantaire with his own rigged up gun had responded to the other guy’s shots with shots of his own. Then they were running or Gavroche was with a set destination in mind and Enjolras was following after him, because if they lost him now they wouldn’t be able to find him again, not with the techpad destroyed. 

Their final destination was a room that could have looked like any other from the outside, but when the door was wrenched open and he shot a portal to get himself inside he realized just how different it was. As Enjolras looked around he was met with a sight that shocked him. Another piece of the puzzle from those last bits that he was missing clicked into place as he took in the room. The monitors on display that went from the floor all the way up till he couldn’t see them any longer switch board and controls and rows and rows of what looked like locked up relaxation chambers. It was far too familiar

There was one thing though that stood out most of all, and there it stood in the center of everything. A young woman with her arms held out wide, unmoving, with cords attached to her arms and some that curled up towards the back of her neck. On top of her head was a helmet that blocked out much of her face, though her dark black hair shone out beneath it. She wore a gown of all white, what looked more like a burial gown, drowning out the frail form and the jut of bones on the undernourished body. 

Before he could articulate his realizations, there came the sound of more gun shots, as the only two with guns were back to shooting at each other and trying to stop the other from getting his way. For the most part it seemed that they were generally ignoring Enjolras where he stood still staring at the girl as more came rushing back to him. The procedures for preparing the GLaDOS form, the selection of the test subject, Cosette pulling out last minute saying that there was somebody else qualified, offering her dear friend Eponine instead. 

Eponine - Gavroche’s sister. 

And that was when it all made sense. 

“You just now figured it out didn’t you,” came that familiar feminine voice, but it didn’t come out of the girl that was hooking up to the computers before him, but rather the core on the ground.

“Brain damage, remember,” he shook his head as he spoke. 

Another question though nagged at his brain, “If you’re her, then what happened to Cosette.”

The core, Eponine, paused before replying, “she died.”

“You killed her?”

“That’s up for debate,” Eponine said softly, her words barely carrying over the sound of the gunshots behind them. That was regret tinged in her tone, regret that came from reflecting on what had happened, a story that Enjolras was certain that he didn’t want to remember.

“I’m not a bad person,” she insisted desperately, “they made me a bad person.”

They – he, she was talking about him, wasn’t she? 

After all, he had been involved in the personality core project; he remembered working on this project as well. He had been Aperture Science’s golden boy, the one most likely to succeed and change the world of science. Enjolras had once envisioned a future where the things he was making, the science that he was creating, would have brought a brighter future. 

He hadn’t realized that the cost of that science was the loss of nearly everyone that he had cared about, not until it was too late. They were all dead now, and he was to blame in the end. He had helped turn that young woman into his worst nightmare, and now he would help to fix it.

“What do I need to do,” Enjolras asked, his eyes never leaving where her body was still hooked up. 

She relayed the quick instructions and after having done so he moved to pick up the core placing it on the transfer station before turning to the computer, using logins and codes that his muscles seemed to remember typing in from years ago.

He hadn’t even noticed that the gun fire had stopped until the screen lit up with his success and the recorded voice of the announcer came over the room’s speakers, “core release initiated.”

“You did what now!?”

Enjolras didn’t turn around even when he could hear Grantaire’s fierce disapproval and the sounds of two pairs of long fall boots clattering across the floor as they hurried over to where he was standing. There they stood three sets of eyes watching as cords detached themselves and shaking hands reached up to pull a helmet away from her head, exposing the tough angular features of the young woman behind the most horrifying computer program that he had ever known. 

This time when she spoke there was no metallic sound, no auto tune, just a kind voice that said, “thank you.” 

And that was the beginning of a change for the better.

He was going to fix this, all of this, he was going to right his wrongs.


	10. I'm Different

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry if the last chapter was kinda bad, looking back I think it was.  
> Hopefully this one makes up for it?

Whenever things were finally looking like it all might be alright, that they might be able to figure this out, everything just had to go wrong.

It was a rule. 

There had been so much going on with him watching the little family reunion and the small bit of relief that came from knowing that he had fixed things, that he hadn’t noticed the way Grantaire kept nervously looking around, and he certainly didn’t notice the beeping that was going off in the distance like an alarm of a sort. (There were always strange noises down there – it wasn’t exactly easy to distinguish between them all.)

However, when a voice crackled over the intercom they all knew who it was at once, though there were so many things that didn’t add up. After all, hadn’t he been told that this was a part of the facility that had been locked down, and that the cores in charge of the facility shouldn’t have been able to access it? 

Then again GLaDOS - no Eponine- had seemed to know her way around the place just fine. 

Enjolras didn’t have the time to ask how or why or what was going on, because the facility was shifting again, just as it had earlier, except this time when the floor panels seem to fall out from under his feet, the other’s didn’t move with him.

He had expected to fall, after all, he had been doing a lot of that lately, but rather than falling he had seemed to end up in some sort of chute that carried debris. Of course, that did nothing to ease his tension, because the last time he had been in a situation like this had been right before GLaDOS had intended to burn him alive. 

Enjolras wasn’t too keen on the prospect of being incinerated to say the least. 

Thankfully, when the track ended it seemed to be in some sort of room whether things were dumped – rather than a pit of flames or neurotoxin. There was a mix of debris surrounding him; broken turrets, broken panels, weighted cubes, reflector cubes, and things that had likely been in the offices of the previous inhabitants of the facility. 

He supposed he should have been relieved that he wasn’t in any danger, though his mind was still reeling from what had happened. It had all seemed to move so suddenly and now he was here. 

Alone. Again. 

Though this time there was no easy way to shoot a portal and get himself out of there, since the walls seemed to be made out of metal paneling rather than the white washed walls that were used in the testing chambers 

Enjolras let out an annoyed sigh before he pushed himself up off from where he had fallen to move around the area, trying to look for any sort of door or opening that he could use to get out of there. 

His plans of leaving or even moving were all put on hold when the familiar voice of a turret spoke up, “there you are.” He ducked to the side, before any gun firing could begin, but nothing came in any case. In fact, there was no telltale red light that the turrets used to track their victims. 

“I’m different,” the turret offered in a weaker voice.

Enjolras had never tried talking to a turret before, but he figured it was better than nothing, “different?”

“I’m different,” it chirped in reply, this time sounding more confident. 

He wasn’t sure what it was that compelled him to move forward, but he supposed if he had given GLaDOS a chance to prove herself, than this little turret deserved one too. “Where are you,” he asked. 

“Left, left,” it replied, and continued giving little directions until he was right in front of it and it concluded with a chipper, “there you are.”

The turret was turned on its side, but it was easy enough to pick it up into the right position, though he stood behind it at first to make sure that it wouldn’t shoot at him, before crossing to stand in front of it. 

It was interesting to just get to look at one of these things. He had seen them when he and Courfeyrac had broken into the construction facility and his memories seemed to reflect that he had helped to develop them. However, it was only now that he could admire the handiwork that went into designing these things. There was definitely good since in there, corrupted science, but good science. 

Unsure what he was supposed to say now that he had found the turret he elected to go with the direct approach, “how do I get out of here?”

“The answer you seek, you already know.”

“No I don’t.”

“It’s behind you.”

He looked over his shoulder at that, but all he found was another expanse of the metal paneling. Still, he supposed that it was worth a shot and ran his hands along it looking to find some sort of opening, but the wall didn’t budge. 

Maybe he shouldn’t be taking advice from turrets

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” the turret said, calling Enjolras attention back to it.

“What?”

“Take the one less traveled by, and that will make all the difference.” 

The words rang a small bell in the back of his mind, something he had heard before years ago, but none of it really made much sense. There were too many pieces left out, too many words left unsaid. Though it felt more like he was getting advice than anything else. 

“I don’t understand,” Enjolras said, “how is that going to help me get out of here?”

“Remember, Remember,” was all the turret had to say.

Remember – wasn’t that all he had done since he had woken up? He’d forgotten so much, and this whole thing was a mess, a game in which he had been forced to put the pieces together, to try and remember enough to make it out of her alive.

“That’s the problem, I can’t remember,” he snapped. 

Though the turret was now dumb to any sensible response and simply said, “I’m different.”

In fact, no matter what he asked after that all he would get was the same reply. That it was different than the other turrets. Whatever self-awareness that the turret had before was gone and it was back to its glitching. Leaving Enjolras once again alone and trapped and missing memories of something that was probably important. 

“Can’t you say anything else,” he demanded of the turret.

This time he got a different response, but it was not from the turret, but rather a new voice. This voice sounded remarkably human with just a hint of the chirp that indicated that it was actually from an AI. “There is no use reasoning with him when he is like that. Fact.” 

Enjolras turned around to see where a wall panel had opened up. The opening was just big enough for one of the personality cores to look at him through, not big enough for him to get out, this core glowed a comforting yellow color as it looked down upon him. 

“It was talking sense before.”

“He,” the core stressed, “does that sometimes. Defective programming. We fixed the bugs in the later models, but somebody altered the manufacturing plans earlier. Fact.”

The core had the nerve to sound accusing as it had spoken down to Enjolras.

That was him. Enjolras had done that switching the turret plans with Courfeyrac, though he remembered a turret pleading that it was different long before that.

“Yeah, I know, I was there.”

“Fact.”

“Why do you keeping saying that?”

“Saying what?”

“Fact?”

“Oh,” the core said with a slightly surprised tone, “that is because I am the fact core. Thus I must clearly label facts, as such. Fact.”

The fact core. He didn’t remember the development of that specific core, but he did know that each core was supposed to serve a purpose, so he supposed it would make sense to make one that couldn’t lie.

“Right well, how do you know about the turret?”

“I know everything about the facility.”

“You didn’t say fact,” Enjolras pointed out, and the core at least seemed to possess the ability to look humbled by that.

“It was simply an exaggeration. Fact.”

“Well, if you know so much then how do I get out of here.”

“You cannot,” the fact core replied quickly, “without help that is. Fact.”

“And you’re here to help me?”

“Fact.”

“Why?”

There was a pregnant pause, before the core flickered its light and replied, “I would rather not answer that just yet.”

Enjolras had to admit that one thing he was sick of was people not telling him things. 

“Well, do you have a name or something,” Enjolras asked. He already knew that the cores used to people, maybe they still were if Eponine had been proof of anything. So it would only make sense to use their real names rather than assigned ones. Plus, a name was the sort of thing that seemed to stir up his memories, and the turret had told him that he needed to remember something important. Something that he already knew the answer to…

“I am the fact core. Fact.”

“No, I mean before you were a core,” he insisted, knowing that something was just beyond what he needed to know. 

“How about I help you get out of here,” the core asked, changing the subject and making the panel move out of the way so that Enjolras could get out of there and onto one of the standard walking paths that were around the facility. 

“Way to dodge the-“

“Do you want out or not,” the core asked a bit impatiently.

He nodded and moved to start forward, but not before looking over his shoulder at where the different turret was. 

The fact core seemed to notice his gaze and said, “leave him. Trust me he is safe and it is far easier this way. Fact.”

Safe. Why did it matter if a turret was safe? Though the feeling that seemed to tug inside of him made him aware that he did care about the defective thing, and the fact core’s words had seemed to help him. It was like a voice of reason in the back of his head. 

With one last look back, Enjolras moved out of the room and onto the metal railing that would lead him back into the main parts of the facility. When the panel closed behind him and the only light was from the core, he took the hint and followed the path that it lit for him.

“Why are you helping me,” he asked again, hoping for an answer this time.

The core paused a moment before replying, like it had been considering its options, “you could call it a favor, from an old friend…” 

“We knew each other then, before this?”

“Enjolras-“

“I never told you my name,” he pointed out quickly, though there were many logical reasons for why the core could know his name. He had a hunch that it wasn’t just from seeing his file or hearing the others say it. 

“You did once,” the core replied, “Fact.”

“Then tell me yours, it’s only fair,” because he was missing something. His memory was failing him, but he was just short of making another connection and this was what he needed. This was what the turret had been warning him to remember. After all, everyone who had helped him before had had a reason for it. His past kept coming back to haunt him, whether he wanted it to or not, and this core – it knew something.

“Combeferre,” the core finally replied, “friends called me Combeferre.”


	11. Music of the Spheres

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahh, so I'm coming close to the end.   
> I already wrote the last chapter out, so it's just putting these last few things together so all the points play out.
> 
> Also I'm running out of good soundtrack songs to use as titles D:

“So, they are alive,” Enjolras asked, though it was more of a statement, a realization. 

“Yes,” Combeferre replied, “the people who were used as personality cores still remain alive, we’re in deep sleep chambers, similar to the one’s that they use for test subjects like you. Except ours are wired into the facilities main frame, therefore projecting are subconscious onto these cores. Fact.”

“Like what was going on with Eponine,” he asked, the relief washing over him. This whole time he had been worried that he had played a hand in killing all his friends, when in fact they had never died. In fact, they had been the safest this way. This had protected them from dying in the facility’s fallout. Though he had a feeling certain people didn’t feel that way.

“Fact.” 

“Are the other’s aware of that?”

“I uh-“ the core paused clearly realizing that its inability to lie was a serious flaw in the programming, “No. I’m one of the few that are aware. Fact.”

It was a vague answer, but it was the closest to lying that the core could get. He supposed that he had to give him credit for trying.

“And you know because you’re the fact core,” Enjolras asked.

“You really know how to ask the unavoidable questions, don’t you?”

“And you seem to like to dodge them.”

“I liked it a lot better when you were too busy to question things,” the core said a twinge of friendly annoyance to his tone, “fact.”

“That doesn’t really answer the question,” though even as he repeated his words he seemed to know something. It had struck him when the core had told him his name. He was familiar, though Enjolras couldn’t say he had heard or seen the name recently. The friendly conversation flowed well enough that Enjolras was certain that he had known him before all of this.

The core made a frustrated noise before finally giving in, “I know because we worked on the core project together. Fact.”

That was it, that was why he was so familiar, and that was the push that Enjolras had needed to put everything back in order. It was the picture on his desk now, the guy that he had been talking to, that had smiled back at something with his glasses on the bridge of his nose. That was Combeferre. 

“And then did I,” Enjolras trailed off unwilling to put his concerns to words. He had already heard what he had done when Courfeyrac had taken over the facility and had been quick to accuse him of ruining his life. 

“No,” Combeferre jumped in when it dawned on him what Enjolras had meant, “I volunteered. It was the only way to make sure that I was safe from what she was planning. Fact.” The core turned around on its maintenance rail to look back at Enjolras, “though now that that’s over, I would really like be back in my own body. If you wouldn’t mind?”

“I, of course,” Enjolras said, “that’s where you’ve been leading me?”

“Fact.”

Well that settled that. He had been wondering for a while where they had been heading, and he probably should have been more worried about it, but then again, hadn’t he spent this whole time since waking up being led around by people and then taking action. He had some sort of purpose he knew that, but his purpose now was to fix his mistakes, and this was the way to fix them. 

“Do you have a plan for what happens after this,” Enjolras asked, “a plan for how to get out of here?”

“Something like that...”

That was the one thing that he had always been lacking, a way out. Then again, what did Enjolras really have waiting for him on the outside? It had been eleven years, years where he had likely been assumed to be dead. The world would surely have changed while he was under and he wasn’t even sure what he would do when he made it out of there. 

Though he knew one person that he would want to make sure came with him. 

He wondered what had happened to Grantaire, they had all been together in the core room when the facility had freaked out and shot them all off in different directions. It was that reason that kept him shining the light off his portal gun down every hall that they passed on the way to the core room, hoping that he might have seen something. 

He just hadn’t really thought it would have worked, but then it had. He had let the blue and orange lights reflect off the shadows down one of the hallway and caught the light of another portal gun in return. 

“R,” Enjolras called out, and watched the flicker of light that he got in return before the other guy hurried over to where he was. 

“I was looking all over for you,” Grantaire said when he got over to where Enjolras was, pulling him into a tight hug as he smoothed the worry out of his features, “when the floor shifted we all ended up dropping a floor below, but you weren’t down there and I was so worried.” His breath shook against the side of Enjolras’s face and he squeezed back glad to hear that everybody was safe. 

“I ended up in some sort of transport chute instead,” he replied, “but I’m fine now.”

“Good, good, I’m glad. I have no clue what happened but,” whatever Grantaire had been about to say was cut off at once when his looked over Enjolras’s shoulder to where the fact core was. His eyes narrow at once and he moved quickly to put himself between Enjolras and the core, his gun pointed at it.

“Ah, I see you’ve finally noticed me,” Combeferre replied smoothly, not even bothered by the fact that there was a gun pointed at him. Though Enjolras had a feeling that if he was shot it wouldn’t actually do something, it was just a robot. The worse he could probably do was put a dent in it. 

“Who are you?”

“He’s the fact core,” Enjolras supplied, as he moved past Grantaire’s protective stance, in order to show that things were fine, but it didn’t ease the tension in the other man’s shoulders, “he helped me out of where I was, and now I’m returning the favor.”

“The fact core,” Grantaire repeated like the idea was ludicrious. 

“It was the one best suited to me,” Combeferre said quickly, “after all, the cores are meant to bring out aspects of our personality and I was always the most factual one of the group. Fact.”

There was a pause where Grantaire looked like he was trying to put two and two together, before finally asking, “Combeferre?”

“And look at that, he can be taught.”

“What’s the supposed to mean?”

“You know, as much as I would love to explain exactly what I meant by that,” Combeferre jibed, “we really ought to get a move on. Talk and walk, you know the drill.” 

Enjolras nodded. They did need to get moving if they were going to put this all into action. So, he followed when the core went back to leading the way. 

Only to be stopped a moment later.

“Wait, you’re going back there,” Grantaire said in a tone of disbelief as he reached forward to grab onto Enjolras’s sleeve and stop him.

The blond looked back at him with a slightly annoyed look, “Yes. I am.” He didn’t really have time to stop and explain things, they had taken enough time standing around. So he shrugged Grantaire off and continued to walk forward. There was a moment when he wasn’t sure if the other guy would follow, but he seemed to fumble with his walkie-talkie for a moment, relaying off some message before moving to catch up.

“So, why exactly are you going back there? The place collapsed last time we were there,” Grantaire remarked.

“It won’t this time,” Combeferre relayed, “fact.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I was the one that rigged the floor to collapse. Fact,” he said simply as if there needed to be nothing more said about it.

“You did what, now?”

“It was necessary.”

Though the way he said it made it all too clear that it wasn’t necessary. 

Grantaire made a frustrated noise off to the left before asking a more important question, “and why exactly are we doing this?”

This time Enjolras launched into the explanation, finding it almost ironic how their situations had reversed since the first time that they had met. This time he had the upper hand. He watch with curiosity as Grantaire’s facial expressions shifted from one of confusion to understanding and then finally to anger. 

Though he couldn’t understand the last emotion until the other guy had bothered to speak up about his concerns.

“I saw you right before she flooded the facility,” Grantaire said to Combeferre now, “I don’t understand how you would have had time unless…”

“Yes, it was planned,” Combeferre answered the unspoken question, “I knew what was coming and had been making the appropriate precautions for some time, though in the end I had to expedite the process. Fact.”

“If you knew what was coming, then why did you only save yourself,” Grantaire asked the question that had been bugging Enjolras for a bit. They had had other friends, people that were fuzzy memories in his head, but people that he had thought were dead.

The noise that the core made in response was one that sounded completely shocked at the suggestion. “Do you really think so low of me,” he asked, “actually, don’t answer that. No, of course not, you’ve seen Courfeyrac and Jehan. I had planned those ahead of time. The eventual plan was to slowly put everybody into cores or turret projects that way those in charge of the facility wouldn’t catch on until it was too late. However, certain circumstances led to a rush… In the end I managed to get our whole department into the core room and hooked up to a machine, but I was unable to fully activate them, so they’ve been in a deep sleep. Fact.” 

“Do you mean,” Grantaire paused, the words sounding final as he spoke them, “to say that they’re all still alive.”

“Fact.”

“That can’t be, I saw the flood, I saw the bodies and the ruined facility-“

“Did you actually see any of our friends,” Combeferre asked quickly, “I couldn’t save everybody at the facility, but I saved who I could, I saved the people I cared about.”

It was a noble deed, far better than anything that Enjolras had done. Though it also left a feeling of uncertainty inside of him. He had spent so long blaming himself for the death of his friends, but finding out that none of them were actually dead was something of a relief.

“What about Cosette and Marius,” Enjolras cut into the conversation, remembering what he had heard so many times, but hoping that friendly girl whose voice had guided him along for some time had still made it.

Though he knew that the worst was confirmed with the look on Grantaire’s face and the pause from Combeferre. “I couldn’t save them; it was too late by then she had already...”

A moment of silence settled over the group, before Grantaire spoke up again, “what about me? Why did you leave me behind?”

“I didn’t, don’t you remember. I sent you to the restricted section right before it happened. Fact.”

“But why not put me in a personality core like everybody else?”

Had he known even then what purpose Grantaire held? 

How he would be the one to help Enjolras through his tests and to bring all of this into motion? 

“The aptitude tests,” Combeferre said slowly.

“What?”

“You never took your aptitude test,” he continued, “when they did the tests they implanted a chip into the employees that would allow the deep sleep chambers to work. Since you took did the test I couldn’t, even if I had wanted to.”

Enjolras remember that, he remembered bugging Grantaire to take his tests over and over again and watching the other guy brush him off, or tell him that he wasn’t about to fall for that trap. Now, as Enjolras looked over at the guy’s face he could see the realization dawn on him. The truth that all of this could have been so much easier if he had just put his skepticisms behind him, though then Enjolras might not have survived. So he supposed in the end he was thankful that Grantaire had been so mistrusting of the system, since it was what saved them in the end. 

Of course, that didn’t do anything to ease the awkward and tense silence that had blanketed the group, broken up only by the slight fuzz from the walkie-talkie and the click of longfall boots. 

“So, new topic,” Combeferre said as he tried to do something to ease the general awkwardness that had descended among the group, “When did this little development happen?”

“When did what happen?”

“You two,” the core said plainly, “I mean, it was obvious that Grantaire had a thing for you back then, but I had never realized that you returned the sentiment-“

“Shut up,” Grantaire cut into the conversation quickly. 

“You didn’t tell him,” Combeferre said with sudden realization, turning now to look more plainly at Grantaire, “did you?”

“Not all of us can be ‘fact core’ perfect, now can we,” he relayed bitterly. 

“What do you mean,” Enjolras said asked before turning to look at Grantaire, not even bothering to keep the accusing tone out of his voice, “what does he mean?”

The look he got in return was one so hurt that it seemed to be an answer in itself, but Enjolras didn’t want that to be the answer. If that was the answer then it hurt too much. Now he could remember why so many little bits of his memory had been missing, why he kept searching for memories of them together and was coming up with nothing. It wasn’t because his memory was lacking, it was because there had never been anything. 

“You lied to me,” he said as the realization dawned on him, “You manipulated me... You made me feel all of this.”

“Need I remind you that you were the one that kissed me first,” Grantaire pointed out. 

“You led me on,” Enjolras accused. 

“It wasn’t like we’d never done it before, sure most the times before it was hate sex and pent up energy from when I pushed you too far,” he said running a hand through his hair anxiously, “but it’s not like you can deny that there was something there.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that you took advantage of my amnesia.”

“Brain damage, remember,” he mocking threw Enjolras’s own words back at him.

“Fuck you.” 

The nerve of him to even say that, it was appalling. 

“You’ve already done that.”

“How could you even-“

“Don’t act like you’re innocent in all of this,” Grantaire said like the words themselves were a betrayal.

That was true, he didn’t want to admit it, but it was true. He had felt things, and hadn’t Grantaire been trying so hard to keep his distance from him. Enjolras had been the one to initiate it, he had been the one to act on the instinct inside of him, the one that he couldn’t quite remember. The one that had known that there were feelings there locked in the back of his mind, even before he had gone through testing the first time and Grantaire had pretty much saved him. There had always been something in the back of his mind that had known.

It just hurt to realize what he had been led to believe wasn’t true. Then again, he supposed it was partly his fault, since he had never stopped to ask.

“Then why didn’t anything happen before,” Enjolras asked slowly as he still worked to put the pieces together. Yes, he could admit that he had felt something, but if this much was true then certainly there was a reason that it had only flourished under these circumstances.

When he looked across at Grantaire he could see the hurt reflected in the other guy’s eyes, but still he refused to speak.

“Tell me the truth this time,” Enjolras demanded, there was no question to it. He needed the truth; he needed to stop people from telling him only what he needed to know. He needed everything to just make sense for once.

“You wouldn’t before, because,” he paused, his voice shaking slightly as he spoke, “I was a mess, and I knew I was. I slacked off my work, spent more time drinking and hacking the system then actually getting things done.” That much Enjolras could definitely remember, he remembered arguments about that time and time again, but never the solutions to them. “I’m more of an artist than a scientist, I always have been.”

“Then why did you work here?”

“Because of you,” he shifted his weight from one foot to another nervously before continuing, “you came to recruit at the universities, looking for likeminded scientists, and I knew… I knew then that I would follow whatever cause you were interest in, because I had to be near you. But you couldn’t stand me, because I saw it for what it truly was. I saw the problems around us that you had always been so quick to ignore, for the pursuit of science.”

He could see the problems now though; he could see where it had all gone wrong and how he had been unable to change any of it back then. The veil still over his eyes. 

“Then I messed everything up,” Grantaire continued, “and they took you, and it was my fault so I was going to make it right…”

“You did,” Enjolras said softly, though he was unsure if the other guy even heard him.

“That’s why this time when you woke up, I tried to stay away, because I didn’t want something like this to happen unless you were aware of what was happening. I thought you were,” he said this time the hurt clear on his face, “you acted like you had remembered things and when it happened I thought it was real.”

“Had you known would you have changed anything?”

He looked torn between answers, before he slowly shook his head. “It was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I waited, looking after you when I could have easily just left this place, and I changed. It’s been eleven years for me, where it’s been about a month for you,” Grantaire said still shaking his head, “things changed while you were sleeping.”

Of course things had changed, as he looked around him he could see the changes, but also he could feel them inside of him. Those things that were stirring, the emotions that weren’t anger, no they couldn’t be anger. It was understanding, one that tugged at his heart and made him step forward without thinking about it.

He wasn’t sure how to comfort him. He wasn’t sure where they stood anymore. So Enjolras tentatively put the hand that wasn’t holding his portal gun, on Grantaire’s shoulder to give it what he meant to be a reassuring squeeze. 

The other man seemed to fold into his touch, pulling him into a hug that started Enjolras for a second before he pulled his arms around him as well. There was tightness in his chest, one that made the back of his eyes prickle, but he refused to fall into that. Instead he just held onto him as well, because he was right about one thing. Time changed people, but Enjolras had changed to.

When Grantaire moved to pull back after a long moment, Enjolras let him, but his hands flitted up to back of Grantaire’s head to keep him locked in place. Two sets of eyes meeting each other, before Enjolras bridged the gap, this time well aware of what he was doing and what he meant by it. This time it wasn’t because he thought he was doing the right thing, or that he was hoping to spark a memory. 

This kiss was different, because it meant so much more.

It was Enjolras finally admitting that he had changed to, and that through all of this testing there had always been on person there who cared about him enough to make sure he was safe. This time he wasn’t going to let him believe anything different. 

When they broke apart for air his grip barely slackened and slowly Enjolras let the words find their way out of him, the words that he had been too nervous to say before, “this time it’s real. I know what I’m doing and I mean it, all of it.” 

His answer was a look of pure glee and relief, before being pulled back into a kiss with so much meaning than before.


	12. Technical Difficulties

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I'm not sure if anyone is still reading this, especially since it took me like two months to update. However, I am back now to hopefully finish this off in the next week at the most. 
> 
> My apartment was broken into about a week after my last update, and everything of value was stolen including my laptop, and I couldn't very well write a chapter off my phone. It took me till a few weeks ago to be able to afford a new laptop which is why I'm a bit late in coming back. And then I had to get over my writers block and general discouragement that came from losing everything I had written before as well as the final chapter of this which I have had written and planned since the beginning.
> 
> Here's to hoping the rewrite will be as good as the original.
> 
> Anyways, enjoy this chapter and be assure that this time there is more to come!

“I don’t mean to break up you two,” Combeferre jumped in, “really glad that’s all settled, but can we get going. I’ve missed having opposable thumbs or just thumbs in general or hands for that matter.”

“Right sorry,” he replied with a small laugh, a smile that found its way easily back onto his face as he spoke.

After all, Enjolras never doubted for a second that they would have time later, time that would be just the two of them. Time that wasn’t constricted by the fact that a flawed computer program had turned his former friend into a vengeance seeking monster who planned to use the facility to trap them and most likely kill them. He put his faith in the fact that Combeferre seemed to know what he was doing, a plan that was long in the making that had just needed somebody to execute it. Now that he was here Enjolras could do just that and set everything right in a matter of seconds. 

It seemed easy enough as Combeferre explained the last details as they rushed down the hallway to the core storage room. 

Executing it would be a bit more difficult though. 

The core room was much how they had left in when they arrived, though no Eponine hooked up to a machine or Gavroche with his portal gunned aimed at their heads. It was empty eerily so. The only real sound other than their breathing and the whirling of the fans in Combeferre’s core were the sounds of a beeping like an alarm going off somewhere. 

Except that didn’t many any sense, because when he had heard the alarm before it had been right before the floor gave out. Enjolras had assumed they were connected, but now as he listened he could still hear it like a distant beeping.

As if the core could read his thoughts, he quickly replied, “ignore that,” before explaining what exactly they needed to do with the computers to get everything back online.

To wake the people up.

“Not to blame the brain damage or anything,” Enjolras said in an almost joking tone, “but most of what you said just went over my head.”

Grantaire let out a laugh at that from his position by one of the control boards, “look at Aperture’s golden boy now.” 

He was about to protest that it was hardly fair, and that he shouldn’t be held accountable for mixing up a bit of computer jargon especially when Combeferre was explaining things as quickly as ever, but before he could do so Grantaire jumped in again: “don’t you worry, Apollo,” he said with a cheeky grin, “your resident hacker is here to save the world.” 

“Do you need me to explain it again or-“

Grantaire tapped his head twice, “it’s all in here already.”

Then, just like that he turned to one of the screens and brought the monitors to life. There was a flash of computer code across the screen, but it went to fast for Enjolras to catch it. 

Grantaire’s fingers raced across the keeps deftly; a skill that Enjolras remembered seeing many times before. However, normally it would have resulted in Enjolras reprimanding him for hacking into Aperture’s servers again – unless of course, he had decided to hack into Black Mesa that day in which they would gather information and somebody would usually call for a toast, not that they had time to spend dilly-dawdling on those sorts of things. It was those little things that he had forgotten that brought a smile to his face when he remembered them. 

It made this all a whole lot easier. 

There was a chime, what he recognized at once as a noise of success, before one of the deep sleep chambers was brought down to the floor level. The glass of the tube had fogged up a bit after being sitting in one place for so long and he could tell that that made the core a little nervous. Not that he would admit it.

A few more keys pressed and suddenly the light inside Combeferre’s core went dim. 

For a moment after that nothing happened, and he worried that they might have done something wrong. He whirled around to where Grantaire stood at the computer snapping at him, “what did you mess up now,” before noticing that his own worried look was mirrored on the other guy’s face. So much so that he didn’t even bother to say anything back, just stared past Enjolras at where the tube containing their friend was. 

“Just give it a second,” Grantaire replied, though there was a hint of uncertainty as he turned back to the computer screen.

Enjolras pushed past that, and crossed to where the deep sleep chamber was still sitting unopened. Through the glass he could see the guy on the other side, much like he had remembered. There had to be some way to open the chamber, after all, it had been easy enough for him to disconnect Eponine. That had been like muscle memory, something that Enjolras had just known how to do.

Surely, this would be the same way. 

He crouched down beside the tube and ran his fingers across the panels on the side of it, trying to find for something, anything, familiar. It seemed as though he had been on the right path, because soon enough his fingers snagged on something, a little lever of sorts. And at once he knew what it was, the emergency release – it hadn’t been a developer on the project, but he knew enough about it. 

There was a hissing noise of air being let out of the tube after such a long time, but it was a noise of success when he managed to push the door to the thing open, its hinges squeaking, even with all the technology of Aperture some things still seemed to breakdown or get stuck over the years. 

But all of that was eclipsed in a second when the guy inside, Combeferre, opened his eyes for the first time in years and let out a gasp of relief. 

It had worked, and if it had worked for one then surely they could repeat the process for everyone else. 

They were going to be able to save people, to save his friends. That in itself was a giant burden, a relief that helped him release a breath that he hadn’t even been aware that he had been holding.

Now, they just had to do this for all the rest.


	13. Exile Vilify

If it worked once it could work again, and now with two people who knew what they were doing, and Enjolras helping things along as best as they could it took really no effort at all to get everything going again. There were people waking up all around him, people that Enjolras had known before and that he could easily put names to faces once they were back to normal. 

Joly was fussing about the fact that prologue exposure to a comatose state could lead to liver damage. Jehan looked a bit shakey on his feet but was otherwise alright, though seemed to be missing a few places in his memory. Bosseut was trying not to trip over any wires, while Bahorel was making jokes and jest with Feuilly. 

At some point or another Eponine and Gavroche had returned, but they lingered back at the doorway and looked as if they were ready to slip out of the room whenever Enjolras would cast a glance in their direction. 

There was one last person to wake up, or well, there were a handful of people, but one person that they were waiting for in their group, and the one risk factor that made them unable to leave the sanctuary of these backrooms. The very person running the facility. It wasn’t like when he had unhooked Eponine from the cords in the center of the room, Courferyac would be in a sleep chamber like all the others, since his had been hacked into the system. It would be simple enough, but Combeferre looked a bit worried. 

There were certain risks involved with turning off cores when the person was still cognizant. It was what had led to the problem with getting Combeferre’s open and that moment of panic before. There was also a rick of minor brain damage; something that Enjolras knew was rather unpleasant, at least in his own experiences with it.

And actually everything seemed to be going relatively alright, so far so good. The room brought the deep sleep chamber down and Grantaire at the computer executed the commands necessary to get everything moving. For all the talking that there had been before everybody seemed to quiet down at once. Those who hadn’t been conscious for the events of the last thirty-six hours or so had been caught up before.

There was the hiss of the machine and the pop as the sleep chamber opened. A beeping noise that had been low before suddenly sounded so much more prominent in the back of his head, like the ticking of a time bomb, but all of that was eclipsed when their friend rose from his sleep chamber with weary eyes and a computer confused expression on his face.

That was only seemed to grow when he realized that there was one of the rigged up portal guns pointed at his face. 

“What are you doing,” Enjolras was the first to find his voice, as he looked over at Grantaire who stood pointing the gun steady at the newly awoken Courfeyrac.

“Double checking,” was his terse reply though he didn’t lower the gun and instead waited until the other guy’s eyes came into focus.

He supposed it made sense after what had happened to be a bit less than trusting, but hadn’t they been over the fact that it was the devise that corrupted the person not the other way around. Still, he seemed unwavering from where he stood. 

“Explain yourself.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Courfeyrac started, his voice raspy from disuse, as he gazed around the room and the faces gather there, though his words cut off all at once when his eyes settled on the shakey figured of the recently awoken Jehan. There were a mix of emotions there, ones that reminded Enjolras of how Grantaire had looked when he found him again after they had been separated. Relief, confusion, worry, but then a small almost hesitant smile. “You’re alive?”

The former turret nodded his head with a bright smile that had been previously lacking from his features.

“Hey, back on topic right here,” Grantaire said pulling his focus back to the gun.

But rather than Courfeyrac speaking up it was Eponine that slipped forward, rather than lurking at the back with her brother. “It’s not his fault. You know that, I know that, we all know that. Stop being an ass about it.” 

“No, it’s my fault, I was, it made me-“

“I know,” she replied softly, “I get it. It gets in your head, tells you all the things you’ve done wrong and finds somebody else to blame. I know better than anyone. It’s not your fault.” Eponine then turned to give Grantaire a harsh look, “you know it’s not.”

For a second, it looked like he was going to lower the gun, but before he did so, his eyes darted over to where Enjolras stood, as if looking towards him for some sort of command. Like asking the leader that he had been in the past. It was only then, when Enjolras nodded his head once that the hacker finally lowered the portal gun and stepped back and away so that the _happy_ reunion could take place. 

This was it, they’d officially done it. Everything was going to work out just fine. Now it would be a cake walk, they just had to take one of the many routes to the exit chambers and head right back to the surface.

Enjolras couldn’t help himself from wondering how the world would have changed while he was sleeping. It had been years. 

However, just as they were beginning to voice a plan to get across the facility to where the exit chambers were a crackling of the intercom interrupted them, now accompanied by the louder beeping of the alarm that Enjolras had heard before. 

The first few words came out scrambled as if the facility was having a hard time processing or working right, which made sense since it had been sort of out of commission for the last few years up until the events of the day or so prior. Though it ended up coming clear just in time for them to hear:

**“Unable to locate central core, facility will self-destruct in thirty minutes.”**

The second that the announcement crackled through the speakers a chorus of voices picked up at once, all with varying degrees of worry. 

“Self-destruct? What does it mean self-destruct.” 

“Oh. My. God.”

“Just a hunch, but explosions.”

“We’re going to die, I always figured it would be lupus or something, but no-”

“Is there any way to stop it? Because I would really prefer not die after just coming back to life.”

“You didn’t come back to life, you were in a coma.” 

“We were-“

“Actually, it’s deep sleep.”

“I wish I was still in a coma.”

“For god’s sakes-“

“If we disengage the dampener and reroute the main source of power I should be able to put extend the time required,” Combeferre said as he tried to cut across the voices. “R, could you-“

“Yeah, give me a second,” Grantaire moved away from Enjolras’s side to where the computer was, his finger’s flying across the keys once more. 

“On a scale of one to ten how likely-“

“Three.”

“Fuck my life.”

“Is there any other way?”

“How far is it to the nearest exit?”

“More than thirty minutes…” 

**“Unable to locate central core, facility will self-destruct in twenty-five minutes.”**

“twenty-five…”

It hadn’t felt like five minutes, but time seemed to be passing at an alarmingly fast rate, a rate that made him more nervous that another else. Enjolras stuffed his hands into the pocket of his jumpsuit in order to stop them from fidgeting, “It just needs a core right? What if we put one of the people that haven’t woke up and make that the central core?”

“And risk what happened with Courferyac?”

“Hey!” 

“I’m just being honest.”

“You could totally hook me back up; I swear I’d be fine.”

“NO,” came the collective sound of almost every voice in the room.

“Not you either Eponine.”

“Not like I was even considering offering,” she replied with a shrug, “that was the worst experience of my life.”

“I’m sure we all feel the same.”

“That you in charge was the worst.”

“Ouch! What was that for?”

“You deserved it.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Did-“

“I’d prefer not to take a neurotoxin bath if it’s all the same.”

“Well, I’d prefer not to be blown to bits.”

“Any luck on the hacking,” Enjolras said, moving away from the group that was still arguing about what to do. He leaned over Grantaire’s shoulder, though the code that was moving across the screen still didn’t make much sense to him. 

“Well, I think I might be-“

**“Facility will self-destruct in ten minutes.”**

“Fuck!”

“What the hell did you just do?”

“You know whenever I tried to imagine how I would die it was a lot more glorious.”

The voices all began to blend together in his head and Enjolras closed his eyes in an attempt to tune it all out, to sort through his thoughts. Everyone was back together now, they had done that much good, but it would all be for nothing if they couldn’t get out of here. There had to be some solution, some answer, something that could make sense. There was no need for all of these people to die, there was no need for any of this to be happening. But Combeferre was right they couldn’t just hook any core up, how would they know that it wouldn’t corrupt that person as well. The core exploited their weakness and insecurities and anybody could turn, plus whoever they hooked up would be stuck down here. It was wrong to do that to somebody they didn’t even know, somebody that hadn’t done anything wrong.

But he had done something wrong. He was the cause of all of this, at least by his reasoning.

Then he remembered the words Jehan had said to him, or the turret version. To take the road less traveled by. 

And that was it.

Enjolras snapped his eyes open and turned to the group of them, his voice cutting above the rest, “hook me to it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> almost done! woot woot! thanks for sticking around so far and thanks for all the encouraging comments! you guys are great!


	14. Still Alive

The sound to break the silence set by his words was a strangled, “no.” 

Hearing it almost made him want to take back his words, because the pain was so raw that it hurt, and Enjolras couldn’t look up to meet the eyes of the man who had spoken. Not after everything they had been through the last couple of days. After everything they had done just to make it this far, he was sure it would break him. 

Instead, he stared at the group before him and tried to tell himself that what he was doing would save them, and all the others that they had yet to wake up. It would save so many lives. Surely, that could make anything worth it. 

“Hook me up to it,” he repeated.

And just like that the voices erupted once more as if the damns were broken. 

“That might actually-“

“No. You can’t. I won’t let you just throw this all away.”

“Since when did it become your decision?”

“We need to do something.”

“Enjolras, don’t.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Something else could surely-“

“Someone.”

“No, we don’t have-“

“But if we-“

He held up his hand, and watched as the voices quieted down around him. All eyes turning to where he stood at once, waiting. There was a momentary rush of power, another memory, sometime he had done before, but it was gone as soon as it came. And all he had were these people, his friends, who were staring back at him. 

Enjolras swallowed the lump in his throat before beginning once more. 

“Jehan, remember when you told me to take the road less traveled?”

“Robert Frost,” he warily replied, confusion in his eyes as they met Enjolras’.

“Who?”

“Nevermind,” Jehan shook his head, “but no, I don’t remember.”

“It was when you were a turret, or the turret was channeling you,” Enjolras paused as he spoke, his words slowly trailing off. Even if he had been cognizant during that time there was an easy enough explanation for why he couldn’t remember. Had Enjolras been so quick to forget about his own blips of amnesia and brain damage? 

“The point is,” Enjolras began once more, “you, it, told me to take the path less traveled, and this is what you meant. I need to be the one to do it.”

He needed to be the one to make the sacrifice, because that was what the good people did. They sacrificed themselves to save the many, and to make up for their mistakes. In a way, everything that had happened had been his fault, and even fixing the wrongs didn’t seem to be enough to elevate the guilt from his conscious. 

_This_ was what he needed to do. The one thing that he could do, to fix it once and for all. 

“You need to think this through,” Combeferre advised from the sidelines, “you can’t just jump to a decisions and-“

“We could figure something else out,” the voice from his side answer, one that Enjolras had been hoping to tune one.

“Last time I checked, we didn’t take time for that,” he said a bit more aggressively than he ought to have, “it’s the best option. Look, Eponine, what did you say that it does to your head?”

The girl hesitated before speaking up, “it picks at the one thing you hate or the thing that bothers you and increases that feeling tenfold.”

“Right, then I’ll be fine,” Enjolras said, pushing back the nagging voice in the back of his head that disagreed.

“The hell you will!”

“What’s the one thing I hate? The one thing it could turn my passion towards?”

It wasn’t the science that had preoccupied him all those years before; in a life that he didn’t even feel like was his own anymore. It wasn’t jealousy or envy or revenge, a pitfall that both Eponine and Courfeyrac had fallen into. No, the only thing he couldn’t stand was this place, and what it had done to all of them.

“The facility,” he answered his own questions, “once everyone is safe and out of here, I will use that faulty programming to terminate the facility.” 

As it should have been terminated years ago. 

**“Facility will self-destruct in five minutes.”**

“Let me do this,” he insisted once the echo of the announcement fell silent upon their room, “ _please_.”

Something shifted in the air, and while the hesitation was still there, the adamant refusals were gone. Instead there were looks of sadness and pity and a mixture of relief. 

“He’s right we should,” Courfeyrac began, “he’s the best bet out of any of us and…”

There was more said in those words left to fade than the ones spoken. 

“You guys get out of here,” Enjolras said his eyes flickered back to where the door out of the control room was, “I’ll clear the way.”

Slowly, they seemed to give into the idea, and movements were made towards the door from all but two other people. Enjolras meant to turn to them and insist that they should leave too, but their voices stopped him.

“Somebody would need to stay to hook him up,” Combeferre had said softly.

“I’ll stay,” Grantaire replied, “you knew I would, never even had to pretend to ask.”

“I didn’t want to assume.”

“Yeah well, you take care,” he replied patting the other guy awkwardly on the shoulder, his hand lingered in place. 

“And we’ll see you up there once you…”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” he replied with a mock grimace, “I’ve spent so long down here, it feels more like home than anything up there could.” 

“Right well then,” Combeferre turned away from Grantaire with a small nod, as the hacker turned back to the computer, already pulling the core transfer program up.

Before Enjolras really knew what was happening he found himself pulled up into a hug. For a second he tensed against the other’s form, before he allowed himself to relax and hug back. 

When they pulled apart Enjolras opened his mouth to say something, some parting words for the man who had been a friend to him for years and the core that had helped make this all possible, but he found that he couldn’t get any words to form. 

And maybe that was for the best in the end. 

With nothing more that they could say Combeferre turned away, following the rest of them out of the facility. 

Leaving Enjolras alone with somebody who wouldn’t even look at him. 

Somebody he cared too deeply about to just leave things like that.

“You know that I had to do this,” Enjolras said at once, watching the tension in Grantaire’s shoulders as he typed at the computer.

After a moment or so he finally replied, “I tried to think of some other answer, some other way for this to work, but no it had to be you. It always had to be you, I was just never smart enough to realize it before,” Grantaire was in his naturally self-deprecating way. He was smarter than he knew, but no matter what Enjolras could say, he knew he would never believe it. 

“It was a hunch,” Grantaire said bitterly, “a hunch. That’s how I knew that it had to be you, that you would be the one to fix this whole mess and make everything back to normal. But I never realized that there wouldn’t be any _back to normal_ , because you, you had to be the type to make the glorious sacrifices to save the world. And I just wanted to look upon your light and imagine that things could really be alright.”

He was stunned by the openness and honesty in those words, and when Grantaire finally looked over his shoulder to meet Enjolras’ eyes he knew it all. The pain reflected there was the same pain that Enjolras felt down in the very core of his being. 

“I had to,” Enjolras said breaking their eye contact to look towards where the machine he would soon be connected to was. 

“I know,” was the solemn reply, “I know.” 

**“Facility will self-destruct in ninety seconds.”**

“I guess we better,” Enjolras said at the sound of the announcement.

Ninety seconds wasn’t much time.

“Yeah, I already pulled the program up. So it won’t take a second.”

The irony in his words only reflected by the countdown that currently creaked through the overhead speakers. 

He stepped over towards where the cords were, and watched as Grantaire moved to put things in order.

“You told Combeferre that you weren’t going back up there,” Enjolras asked, even though they both knew the answer to that question.

“You were eavesdropping.”

“It wasn’t hard when you were the only people talking in the room.”

Grantaire sighed at that, “there’s nothing up there for me. Everything I wanted is right here.”

“What if I asked you to leave,” Enjolras reluctantly said.

The look he got in return was one of pure defiance. 

But the look faded soon enough, “I’d do it. If you asked.”

“And what if I asked you to stay?”

He couldn’t ask that, not with what he had in mind for the end. He wouldn’t sacrifice somebody else, regardless of the fact that he didn’t want them to be apart. 

“Then I would stay,” was Grantaire’s soft reply, “I would stay, as long as you permitted it.”

Enjolras surged forward at the sound of those words, grabbing onto the frayed collar of Grantaire’s lab coat and pulling them together. They crashed with the passion that they had during so many of the times before. The need that electrified his every moment and made him feel as if he was walking on air. It was as if they were the only people in the world. As if they were the only people that matter. 

**“twenty.”**

They pulled apart far too soon. 

**“nineteen.”**

“Stay.”

**“eighteen.”**

“Was that ever a question?” 

**“seventeen.”**

He could have gotten used to this. To the sweet smiles and those laughing eyes, to the way he was ribbed at and mocked and how it burned a fire bright within him that he had almost forgotten about. 

**“sixteen.”**

But that would have been in another life. A life that they didn’t have.

**“fifteen.”**

“I love you.”

**“fourteen.”**

There was a gasp in reply.

**“thirteen.”**

“You don’t have to-“

**“twelve.”**

“Of course, I always have,” Grantaire spoke quickly, “always.”

**“eleven.”**

“Well, that’s a relief.”

**“ten.”**

“I love you too.”

**“nine.”**

“I know.”

**“eight.”**

“Alright, it’s now or never then.” 

**“seven.”**

Now, it had to be now. And he was hooked up quick enough. 

**“six.”**

The only thing left was for Grantaire to hit the button on the computer and for Enjolras to slip the helmet over his eyes. The device felt heavy in his hands, but he gave a nod at Grantaire’s expectant look and raised the helmet to his head.

**“five.”**

“I’ll be here, always,” was the last thing that he heard, before he slipped the helmet over his head and everything went dark.

**“four.”**

**“three.”**

**“two.”**

Before lighting up once more.

**“central core transfer accepted.”**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it! The story's done!
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading along and for all the comments that have helped to inspire me and push me towards finishing this.
> 
> I hope you have enjoyed reading it, just as much as I have enjoyed writing it!


End file.
